According to European directives the German state deregulated several sectors which had been protected monopolies for a long time. A regulatory authority was established for the telecommunication sector with the competence to decide about the access conditions to the bottleneck "local loop". If...

We study how consumer search affects pricing in markets with incumbents and entrants using panel data on German electricity retail markets. Consumers observe the baseline price of the incumbent and decide whether or not to search. Incumbent providers can price discriminate between searching and...