A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost + marginal cost of providing quality). We solve for the optimal buying procedure, i.e. the procedure that maximizes the buyer's expected...

Bargaining is all around us. Bargaining is how prices are set across a range of economic activities such as between licensors and licensees of intellectual property, employees and employers, content providers and distributors, health insurers and hospitals, and in many intermediate product...

We examine the implications of different contractual forms for welfare as well as for firms’ profits in a framework in which a vertically integrated firm sells its good to an independent downstream firm. Under downstream Bertrand competition, the standard result of the desirability of two-part...

Should the buyer of a customized good use competitive bidding or negotiation to select a contractor? To shed light on this question, we offer a framework that compares auctions with negotiations. We then examine a comprehensive data set of private sector building contracts awarded in Northern...

In some industries, monopoly is natural. One provider can serve the relevant demand cheaper than two or more firms. If the monopoly is not contestable, i.e. not controlled by a credible threat of entry, regulation is necessary. The essential facilities doctrine is one such regulatory tool. It...

Public procurement regulations put constraints on the contracts and award mechanisms that public procurement agencies can use. These constraints are not present in the private sector, and recent studies suggest that the added flexibility in private sector procurement offers efficiency...

n the analysis of value capture, it is central to understand what value each group of players can capture when leaving the negotiation table. Frequently, this will entail engaging in competition, i.e., non-negotiated, strategic interactions with the other players. For instance, if merger talks...

We examine the role of competition and mergers in bargaining by embedding a performance game, in which retail prices are determined by competition, into an axiomatic bilateral bargaining model, in which suppliers and retailers negotiate wholesale terms. We prove existence and uniqueness of what...

We propose a general formal structure for symmetric information delegation games that encompasses many existing economic applications in the fields of oligopoly theory, the theory of the firm, strategic trade policy and international political economy. We prove that all individually rational...