This paper examines the welfare implication of banning price discrimination in the intermediate goods market in which a monopolistic supplier contracts with asymmetric downstream retailers. We demonstrate that the supplier has a strong incentive to manipulate interdependent demand structure...

I discuss the impact of tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on consumer surplus in the affected markets. I show that the Chicago School Theory of a single monopoly surplus that justifies tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on the basis of efficiency typically fails....

This paper studies the relationship between horizontal product differentiation and the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination in oligopoly. By deriving linear demand from a representative consumer's utility and focusing on the symmetric equilibrium of a pricing game, we...

We consider a conduct parameter model where firms price discriminate based on the consumers' willingness to pay. For any conduct, the average price is invariant to the extent of price discrimination. Moreover, when the number of prices goes to infinity, there is a linear relationship between...

Using estimable concepts, this paper provides sufficient conditions for third-degree price discrimination to increase or decrease aggregate output, social welfare, and consumer surplus in differentiated oligopoly when all discriminatory markets are open even in the absence of price...

We analyze the effects of accidents and liability obligations on the incentives of car manufacturers to monopolize the markets for their spare parts. We show that monopolized markets for spare parts lead to higher overall expenditures for consumers. Furthermore, while the manufacturers invest...

Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

We study how vertical integration in a two-sided media market affects investments in premium content. We show that a content provider provides the premium content exclusively to a platform, regardless of what the vertical structure of the industry is. However, a vertically integrated content...

Should banks (through Visa) be allowed to own debit clearing networks? This problem combines the classic Cournot (1838)-Spengler (1950) double marginalization problem with the more recent literature on two-sided markets (Rochet and Tirole, 2003). Because both the double marginalization (Weyl,...

We analyze the effects of accidents and liability obligations on the incentives of car manufacturers to monopolize the markets for their spare parts. We show that monopolized markets for spare parts lead to higher overall expenditures for consumers. Furthermore, while the manufacturers invest...