According to the well-known "merger paradox", in a Cournot market game mergers are generally unprofitable unless most firms merge. The present paper proposes an optimal merger mechanism. With this mechanism mergers are never unprofitable, more profitable than in other known mechanism, and in...

Banks supply payment services that underpin the smooth operation of the economy. To ensure an efficient payment system, it is important to maintain competition among payment service providers but data available to gauge the degree of competition are quite limited. We propose and implement a...

Banks supply payment services that underpin the smooth operation of the economy. To ensure an efficient payment system, it is important to maintain competition among payment service providers, but data available to gauge the degree of competition are quite limited. We propose and implement a...

Banks supply payment services that underpin the smooth operation of the economy. To ensure an efficient payment system, it is important to maintain competition among payment service providers but data available to gauge the degree of competition are quite limited. We propose and implement a...

Banks supply payment services that underpin the smooth operation of the economy. To ensure an efficient payment system, it is important to maintain competition among payment service providers but data available to gauge the degree of competition is quite limited. We propose and implement a...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as men do and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al.(2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personality variables to understand the underlying motives of women (and men) to enter...

Die deutsche Industrie schätzt ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit insgesamt als hoch ein; dies gilt insbesondere für eine Reihe von Produktgruppen des Maschinenbaus und der Elektroindustrie. Zu einem erheblichen Teil dürfte dieses an sich positive Gesamtergebnis durch Teilebezug von ausländischen...

There is ample evidence that women do not react to competition as mendo and are less willing to enter a competition than men (e.g., Gneezy et al.(2003), Niederle and Vesterlund (2007)). In this paper, we use personalityvariables toto understand the underlying motives of women (and men) toenter a...

Economic analysis is used to compare different paradigms for understanding the marketplace for religions and religious ideas. The "Sacred Canopy" paradigm views it necessary for social stability to grant monopoly power to an official state religion. The "New Paradigm" views separation of Church...