This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show...

This paper contains an economic and legal analysis of the lawsuit Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice beginning with the District Court's decision on June 7, 2000 up to the Proposed Final Judgement on November 6, 2001. I found that the courts' underlying economic paradigm regarding the...

We study an industry in which an upstream monopolist supplies an essential input at a regulated price to several downstream firms. Legal unbundling means that a downstream firm owns the upstream firm but this upstream firm is legally independent and maximizes its own upstream profits. We allow...

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck (e.g. a transmission network) supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in...

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms provide their workers with skills that are sufficiently general to be potentially useful for competitors. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in industry-specific human capital, then make wage offers for each...

Power market integration is analyzed in a two countries model with nationally regulated firms and costly public funds. If generation costs between the two countries are too similar negative business-stealing outweighs efficiency gains so that following integration welfare decreases in both...

In most developed countries, the provision of water is organized at a local level. The costs and tariffs vary significantly, even between adjacent water utilities. Such heterogeneity is an obvious indication of the sectors overall inefficiency and stresses a need for institutional adjustments....

In German electricity submarkets for residential customers standard contracts offered by former monopolists are the more costly option for customers who have not switched to an alternative contract yet. As most German households are served with this contract type we follow the Limit Pricing...

Cartels were legal to a large extent in Austria until the country’s EU Accession in 1995. We examine archival material on registered horizontal cartels to learn about their inner working. Applying content analysis to legally binding cartel contracts, we comprehensively document different...

In an industry where regulated firms interact with unregulated suppliers, we investigate the welfare effects of a merger between regulated firms when cost synergies are uncertain before the merger and their realization becomes private information of the merged firm. The optimal merger policy...