The purpose of our paper is to examine the profitability and social desirability of both domestic and foreign mergers in a location-quantity competition model, where we allow for the possibility of hollowing-out of the target firm. We refer to hollowing-out as the situation where the target firm...

This paper analyzes the compatibility decision of a dominant hardware supplier. There are two substitutive variants of the hardware component of a hardware-software system, they are horizontally differentiated, and one of the two has a quality advantage. Among other things, we show under what...

Standard analysis of mergers in oligopolies along the lines of the popular Farrell-Shapiro-Framework (FSF) relies regarding its policy conclusions sensitively on the assumption that rational agents will only propose privately profitable mergers. If this assumption held, a positive external...

Deltas, Salvo and Vasconcelos (2011) develop a model of geographically separated markets with differentiated goods in which collusion (or merger to monopoly), by restricting trade relative to duopolistic competition, is beneficial for society and can be beneficial for consumers. In this chapter,...

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...

I present a model of two quantity-setting firms, each producing two goods in a different country, but enjoying a competitive advantage in only one of them. An international cartel can either shut down trade and manufacture both goods domestically or foreclose the inefficient plant and import the...

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...

In the December 2020, the European Commission has presented its proposal for a Digital Market Act (DMA) aiming at promoting competition and preventing unfair practices on digital markets. The DMA creates a new category of platforms, "gatekeepers'', based on criteria relative to their turnover...

The European Commission has made transparent in a number of recent publications that undertakings that colluded to fix prices or share markets can expect fines based on affected commerce as well as private antitrust damage claims. Research on discovered cartels characterizes modern international...

We analyze oligopolistic third-degree price discrimination relative to uniform pricing when markets are always covered. Pricing equilibria are critically determined by supply-side features such as the number of firms and their marginal cost differences. It follows that each firm’s Lerner index...