We analyze the interplay between product market prices and firm boundary decisions. Enterprises are heterogeneous with respect to their productivities and each enterprise chooses between two ownership structures--centralized ownership (integration) performs well in coordinating managerial...

E-book sales surged after Amazon introduced the Kindle e-reader at the end of 2007 and accounted for about one quarter of all trade book sales by the end of 2013. Amazon's aggressive pricing led to allegations that e-books were bankrupting brick-and-mortar book booksellers. Amazon's commanding...

In this note, we investigate the causal link between market concentration and markups in a retail setting. We study the Washington retail cannabis industry, which features exogenous variation in market concentration that resulted from retail licenses being awarded via lotteries. We observe...

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing...

We look at the association between the price of a cryptocurrency and the secondary market prices of the hardware used to mine it. We find the prices of the most efficient Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) for Ethereum mining are significantly positively correlated with the daily price returns to...

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of competitive or exclusive retailers and assigning it to a manufacturer increases the value of a supply chain especially for goods whose demand is highly volatile. This is because doing so solves incentive distortions that arise...

While price-fixing on platforms can attract severe enforcement action, as shown by the Amazon poster case, a more nuanced picture emerges regarding the fixing of prices for sellers by sharing economy platforms. This paper explores possible antitrust responses to such centralised platform-driven...

Asymmetric pricing is the phenomenon where prices rise more readily than they fall. We articulate, and provide empirical support for, a theory of asymmetric pricing in wholesale prices. In particular, we show how wholesale prices may be asymmetric in the small but symmetric in the large, when...

I use a hierarchical perspective to explain the pattern of interindustry wages and capital intensities. Industries that have more productive technologies pay more than less productive ones and are more capital intensive as well. Results on size of the hierarchy, effort levels, and span of...

We examine how retailers discount the prices of product systems versus their constituent components. The topic is important because such systems are ubiquitous in our daily lives. In particular, many high-tech markets revolve around complex multi-component systems – e.g. a camera system...