We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the prescription drug market. There are two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally differentiated (branded) drugs. Patients differ in their susceptibility to the drugs. If DTCA is allowed, this can be employed to induce...

Motivated by the slow diffusion of generic drugs and the increase in prices of brand-name drugs after generic entry, I incorporate consumer learning and consumer heterogeneity into an empirical dynamic oligopoly model. In the model, firms choose prices to maximize their expected total discounted...

We study effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the prescription drug market. There are two pharmaceutical firms providing horizontally differentiated (branded) drugs. Patients differ in their susceptibility to the drugs. If DTCA is allowed, this can be employed to induce...

I study the incentives of oligopolists to acquire and disclose information on a common demand intercept. Since firms may fail to acquire information even when they invest in information acquisition, firms can credibly conceal unfavorable news while disclosing favorable news. Firms may earn...

I review previous approaches to modelling oligopoly in general equilibrium, and propose a new view which in principle overcomes their deficiencies: modelling firms as large in their own market but small in the economy as a whole. Implementing this approach requires a tractable specification of...

Recent court rulings, e.g., in the Gencor and Airtours cases, seem to indicate that the legal concept of joint dominance in oligopolistic markets is equivalent to the economic concept of collusion. This paper argues that the enlargement of the dominance concept to also include oligopolistic...

In many cases, collusive agreements are formed by asymmetric firms and include only a subset of the firms active in the cartelized industry. This paper endogenizes the process of cartel formation in a numeric simulation model where firms differ in marginal costs and production technologies. The...

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists' information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the...

In a bilateral oligopoly, Ghosh and Morita (‘Social desirability of freeentry: a bilateral oligopoly analysis, 2007, IJIO) show that entry is always sociallyinsufficient if the upstream agents have sufficiently strong bargaining power. Weshow that this conclusion is very much dependent on the...