Walmart is one of the most successful companies in the world. With more than $ 524 billion in 2020 revenue and 2.2 million employees, Walmart is the world's largest company by sales volume and is ranked 19th on the Forbes list of the world's largest public companies. Walmart serves nearly 265...

The impact of product variety on welfare has received little attention in the electronic commerce literature. The problem with product variety is that more variety does not necessarily imply higher welfare. This paper finds the conditions under which more variety, if caused by lower fixed costs,...

This paper adds two elements to a standard model of monopolistic competition: First, the number of potential entrants is limited in each period and increases only over time. Second, the potential entrants differ with respect to the consumers' valuation of the variant they could offer. It is...

We analyze the gross welfare gains from real-time retail pricing in electricity markets where carbon taxation induces investment in variable renewable technologies. Applying a stylized numerical electricity market model, we find a U-shaped association between carbon taxation and gross welfare...

Partly motivated by the recent antitrust investigations concerning Google, we develop a leverage theory of tying in two-sided markets. We analyze incentives for a monopolist to tie its monopolized product with another product in a two-sided market. Tying provides a mechanism to circumvent the...

We revisit the relationships between competition and market outcomes in a Stackelberg oligopoly. Consider a differentiated oligopolistic market consisting of n leaders with different efficiencies and m followers. We show that the efficient leader's profit may increase with the number of...

Policies to correct market power and selection can be misguided when these forces co-exist. We build a model of symmetric imperfect competition in selection markets that parameterizes the degree of market power and selection. We use graphical price-theoretic reasoning to characterize the...

This paper studies monopolistic third-degree price discrimination incorporating consumers' fairness concerns: Discriminatory pricing antagonizes consumers and may reduce their demand. In contrast to previous studies, we show that consumers' concerns about price inequity may deter discriminatory...

We show that incomplete cartels in quantity-setting oligopolies may increase welfare, without any efficiencies or synergies being internalized by cartel formation. The main intuition is that the cartel has an incentive to contract output and that the firms outside the cartel react to this by...

This paper empirically examines the effects of discriminatory fees on ATM investment and welfare, and considers the role of coordination in ATM investment between banks. Our main findings are that foreign fees tend to reduce ATM availability and (consumer) welfare, whereas surcharges positively...