Recent empirical studies suggest that there is a rising trend of market power across sectors in advanced economies. We contribute to this line of research by providing industry-specific evidence for German manufacturing industries, based on representative high-quality firm level data from...

We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. We use detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories to estimate demand systems with flexible consumer preferences. We recover markups under...

This paper provides a snapshot of the state of the literature on payment cards, particularly from the perspective of interchange fees and the economics literature on two-sided markets. The paper aims to integrate a wide range of theoretical papers with the relevant empirical research and...

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...

Classic artificial intelligence (Q-learning) algorithms have been capable of consistently learning supra-competitive pricing strategies in infinitely repeated Nash-Bertrand pricing games without human communication. Such algorithms have been able to converge due to the temporal correlation of...

This paper undertakes a critical review of the prospect that self-learning pricing algorithms will lead to widespread collusion independently of the intervention and participation of humans. There is no concrete evidence, no example yet, and no antitrust case that self-learning pricing...

Zone pricing in wholesale gasoline markets is a contentious topic in the public policy debate. Refiners contend that they use zone pricing to be competitive with local rivals. Critics claim that zone pricing benefits the oil industry and harms consumers. With a controlled experiment, we...

Using a comprehensive dataset on the incidence of price-fixing across British manufacturing industries in the 1950s, I compare collusive and competitive industries and find evidence of a negative relationship between collusion and the labour productivity of larger firms relative to smaller...

In the U.S. real estate market, around 30 percent of listed properties remain unsold. We examine whether unsold property listings exert externalities in the housing market. Our study builds on a comprehensive dataset that encompasses residential property listings in Orange County (California)...