The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little...

In its landmark ruling in Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court restricted standing to sue for recovery of antitrust damages to direct purchasers. However, antitrust damages are typically (in part) passed on to intermediaries lower in the chain of production and...

Many high technology goods are based on standards that require several essential patents owned by different IP holders. This gives rise to a complements and a double mark-up problem. We compare the welfare effects of two different business strategies dealing with these problems. Vertical...

In its landmark ruling in Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois in 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court restricted standing to sue for recovery of antitrust damages to direct purchasers. However, antitrust damages are typically (in part) passed on to intermediaries lower in the chain of production and...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a vertical merger that raises rivals costs when downstream competition is à la Cournot between firms with constant asymmetric marginal costs. The main result is that such a vertical merger can nevertheless improve welfare if it involves a...

Contractual inefficiencies within supply chains increase an input price above its marginal cost, therefore they are considered detrimental to consumer surplus. We argue that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to consumers in quality-differentiated markets where the "finiteness property"...

The subject of vertical restraints is well-trod territory in antitrust. Most of the cases, and economic literature, have focused, however, on the physical world of manufacturers and distributors. This paper considers what's new and different about the digital world that matters for the antitrust...

We consider an upstream firm U that supplies a key input to two symmetric downstream firms, A and B, that sell differentiated products. U negotiates bilaterally with A and B over a linear input price, and A and B set output prices. We assume Nash-in-Nash bargaining for input prices, and Bertrand...

The Hollywood quot;studio systemquot; - with production, distribution, and exhibition vertically integrated - flourished from the late teens until 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its famous Paramount decision. The Paramount consent decrees required the divestiture of affiliated theater...