The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

In this paper I set forth an antitrust remedy for the oligopolistic pricing problem. Oligopoly pricing resembles a repeated prisoners' dilemma game. Each firm has an incentive to moderately lower its price and thus increase its sales at its competitors' expense. However, each firm knows that its...

We investigate the competitive effects of spot-price contracting, in which a buyer and seller contract to transact at a future date at the price prevailing in that market at that future date (the ``spot price''); such contracts are ubiquitous in the beef-processing industry, among others. We...

In the 1950s and 60s, Japanese and US antitrust authorities occassionally used the degree of concentration to regulate industries. Does regulating firms based on their market shares make theoretical sense? We set up a simple duopoly model with stochastic R&D activities to evaluate market share...

Motivated by the unprecedented availability of consumer information on the Internet, we characterize the winners and losers from potential privacy regulation in the context of four commonly-used oligopoly models: a linear city model, a circular city model, a vertical differentiation model, and a...

Motivated by the unprecedented availability of consumer information on the Internet, we characterize the winners and losers from potential privacy regulation in the context of four commonly-used oligopoly models: a linear city model, a circular city model, a vertical differentiation model, and a...

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

From the perspective of competitors, competition may be modeled as a prisoner's dilemma. Setting the monopoly price is cooperation, undercutting is defection. Jointly, competitors are better off if both are faithful to a cartel. Individually, profit is highest if only the competitor(s) is (are)...

Cartels are inherently instable. Each cartelist is best off if it breaks the cartel, while the remaining firms remain loyal. If firms interact only once, if products are homogenous, if firms compete in price, and if marginal cost is constant, theory even predicts that strategic interaction...

We investigate the possibility of using public firms to regulate polluting emissions in a Cournot oligopoly where production takes place at constant returns to scale and entails a negative environmental externality. We model the problem as a differential game and investigate (i) the Cournot-Nash...