Current controversies over patent policy place standard-setting organizations (SSOs) on a collision course with antitrust law. Recent theoretical research conjectures that, in an SSO, patent owners can “hold up” patent users in the sense of demanding high royalties for a patented input after...

Motivated by several recent papers on oligopoly theory, we characterize geometric properties of a class of inequalities involving the product of two integrals of the probability density quantile function and its reciprocal. Through three applications, we illustrate how our characterization can...

When a monopolist sells an input to an oligopoly, consumer and total surplus frequently are invariant to changes in passive ownership of the monopolist by downstream firms. Within broad classes of ownership profiles, strong invariance holds: the input and output choices of downstream firms are...

The traditional wisdom holds that the benefits of a decentralized channel structure arise from downstream competitive relationships. In contrast, Arya and Mittendorf (2007) show that the value of decentralization can also come from the upstream relationship when the downstream firms convey...

We analyze the choice of incentive contracts by oligopolistic firms that compete on the product market. Managers have private information and in the first stage they exert cost reducing effort. In equilibrium the standard "no distortion at the top" property disappears and two way distortions are...

This paper proposes and tests a model of supermarket competition based upon John Sutton's (1991) endogenous fixed cost (EFC) framework. The relevance of the EFC framework to supermarket competition stems from the industry's surprisingly uniform competitive structure: irrespective of the size of...

We analyze a Cournot duopoly market with differentiated goods and the separation between ownership and control. We consider a delegation game, for which the owner of a firm hires a manager who acts as if the good has a lower degree of substitutability than it really has. This is so either...

We study a vertically differentiated market where two firms simultaneously choose the quality and price of the good they sell and where consumers also care for the average quality of the goods supplied. Firms are composed of two factions whose objectives differ: one is maximizing profit while...

Firms operating in differentiated oligopoly derive market power in their interface with consumers (and the implied elasticity of demand) and their interaction with rival firms (reflected in their market shares). A change in the concept of demand for the product of any one firm and the...