The seminal paper by Salant, Switzer and Reynolds (1983) showed that merger in a standard Cournot framework with linear demand and linear costs is not profitable unless a large majority of the firms are involved in the merger. However, many strategic aspects matter for firm competition such as...

We set up a sequential merger game to study a firm's incentives to pass up on an opportunity to merge with another firm. We find that such incentives may exist when there are efficiency gains from a merger, firms are of different sizes, there is an antitrust authority present to approve mergers,...

Manufacturers frequently pay fees to supermarkets when they temporarily reduce prices of their products. These funds are used by supermarkets to cover the costs of promotional campaigns and to compensate reductions in markups during promotions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these fees are...

Conjectural variation models are popular in empirical research as they infer the degree of market power from real data. IO-theorists, however disapprove it for lack of theoretical foundation arguing that dynamic reactions are forced into a static model with the strategy space and time horizon...

This paper analyses the incentives to adopt cost-reducing technology by firms in a horizontally differentiated industry. In our model there are several suppliers of a new technology. The extent of the cost reduction depends on the quality of the new technology. A firm has to buy the technology...

We set up a sequential merger game to study a firm's incentives to pass up on an opportunity to merge with another firm. We find that such incentives may exist when there are efficiency gains from a merger, firms are of different sizes, there is an antitrust authority present to approve mergers,...

To be represented by more than one contestant in a contest has advantages and disadvantages. This paper determines the conditions under which it is favorable to send several agents into the contest. -- contests ; Divisionalization ; delegation

The first part of the paper reviews an analytical method for inverting demand in price competition to find the corresponding inverse demand under quantity competition. The method yields a simple function relating demand elasticities with inverse demand elasticities. The second part of the paper...

In this paper, we present a simple model of information provision in competitive markets. We depart from previous literature in that we allow firms to choose both prices and information revelation policies. Under the assumption that the underlying state is binary, we show that in the unique...

We survey the recent empirical literature on structural models of market entry and spatial competition in oligopoly retail industries. We start with the description of a framework that encompasses various models that have been estimated in empirical applications. We use this framework to discuss...