This paper analyzes vertical integration incentives in a bilaterally duopolistic industry where input market outcomes are determined by bargaining. Vertical integration incentives are a combination of horizontal integration incentives up- and downstream and depend on the strength of...

Building on the seminal paper of Ordover, Saloner and Salop (1990), I study the role of reputation building on foreclosure in laboratory experiments. In one-shot interactions, upstream firms can choose to build a reputation by revealing their price history to the current upstream competitor. In...

The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updatinga common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economicmodels of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. Wedispose of the...

When an upstream monopolist supplies several competing downstreamfirms, it may fail to monopolize the market because it is unable to commit not to behave opportunistically. We build on previous experimental studies of this well-known commitment problem by introducing communication. Allowing the...

This paper examines the relationship between tying and vertical integration when an input monopolist can require its downstream buyer to purchase a competitively supplied input from it, or integrate forward in the downstream market. We show tying is an imperfect substitute for vertical...

This paper provides a formal analysis on the investment coordination problem in a vertically separated electricity supply industry, although the analysis may apply also to other network industries. In an electric- ity system, the investment decisions of network and power plants need to be...

The hypothesis that vertically integrated firms have an incentive to foreclose the input market because foreclosure raises its downstream rivals' costs is the subject of much controversy in the theoretical industrial organization literature. A powerful argument against this hypothesis is that,...

We study mass customization in a duopoly game in which the firms' products have different qualities. Whether customization choices are made simultaneously or sequentially is endogenously determined. Specifically, the customization stage of the game involves two periods. Each firm either selects...

This article investigates downstream firms' ability to collude in a repeated game of competition between supply chains. We show that downstream firms with buyer power can collude more easily in the output market if they also collude on their input supply contracts. More specifically, an implicit...

This paper investigates how an incumbent monopolist can weaken potential rivals or deter entry in the output market by manipulating the access of these rivals in the input market. We analyze two polar cases. In the first one, the input market is assumed to be competitive with the input being...