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 conduct a retrospective study of the Sutter-Summit hospital merger to assess whether antitrust enforcement in this matter was appropriate. This consummated merger combined two hospitals located close together in the Oakland-Berkeley region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The greater...

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...

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible, and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed-fee pricing in addition...

The existing literature on mergers in durable goods industries suggests that such mergers will produce much less harm to consumer welfare in the first few years following the merger than mergers in non-durable goods industries, particularly if the pre-merger stock can be kept in service for a...

Price-fixing is characterized when firms are concerned about creating suspicions that a cartel has formed. Antitrust laws have a complex effect on pricing as they interact with the conditions determining the internal stability of the cartel. The qualitative properties of pricing dynamics are...

This paper investigates the effect of Internet car referral services on dealer pricing of automobiles in California. Combining data from J.D. Power and Associates and Autobytel.com, a major online auto referral service, we compare online transaction prices to regular "street" prices. We find...

Price dynamics are characterized when a price-fixing cartel is concerned about creating suspicions of the presence of a cartel. A dynamical extension of static models yields the counterfactual prediction that the cartel initially raises price and then gradually lowers it. An alternative...

This paper examines a monopoly platform's two-sided pricing strategies in a setting with seller competition, which gives rise to not only positive cross-side network effects between buyers and sellers, but also a negative same-side network effect among sellers. We show that platform pricing...