We study the welfare effects of non-binding advance price announcements. Applying a differentiated Bertrand model with horizontal products and asymmetric information, we find that such announcements can help firms to gain information on each other thereby allowing them to achieve higher profits....

We investigate the effect of a ban on third-degree price discrimination on the sustainability of collusion. We build a model with two firms that may be able to discriminate between two consumer groups. Two cases are analyzed: (i) Best-response symmetries so that profits in the static Nash...

Standard economics provides a well-understood framework of the competitive determinants of market prices that is now widely accepted for antitrust analysis. In “two-sidedmarkets,” where firms supply products demanded by two interrelated groups of consumers, these competitive forces operate...

Many experts speculate that U.S. antitrust policy towards horizontal mergers has been too lenient. We estimate the price effects of Whirlpool's acquisition of Maytag to provide new evidence on this debate. We compare price changes in appliance markets most affected by the merger to markets where...

One of the most controversial theories of harm in competition law in general and within the category of exploitative abuses in particular is excessive prices. While many arguments have been given against excessive price cases, there also exist many arguments in favour of such cases. Furthermore...

The paper analyzes the effect of the New York State Milk Price Gouging Law 200% rule (June 1991-October 2008) on the nature of price-transmission process and supermarket pricing strategies in the fluid whole milk market. This rule established that the retail prices of fluid milk products were...

The Robinson-Patman Act is not likely to disappear anytime soon, despite repeated efforts at repeal, and the time has come to devote greater attention to moderizing its interpretation. Specifically, it is time to abandon the conventional wisdom that the value of price reductions and promotional...

We demonstrate that cost pass-through can be used to inform demand calibration, potentially eliminating the need for data on margins, diversion, or both. We derive the relationship between cost pass-through and consumer demand using a general oligopoly model of Nash-Bertrand competition and...

In this Perspective, I review arguments that broadband providers may be anticompetitively imposing usage-based pricing to protect their profits from “core” services (e.g., voice, video, texting) against the proliferation of “over the top” services and, as such, new price regulation of...

Farrell and Shapiro proposed a simple test of the possible upward pricing pressure (UPP) following a merger. They showed that the test may give false negatives, that is, indicate that a merger may not give an UPP, while a more comprehensive test would indicate the opposite. We show that their...