We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices and some know neither. We show that two types of signalling...

We run a market experiment where firms can choose not only their price but also whether to present comparable offers. They are faced with artificial demand from consumers who make mistakes when assessing the net value of products on the market. If some offers are comparable however, some...

Energy products such as power, gas, and oil have long been the world's premier commodities. Consumers demand that power and fuel are available when they want it and they prefer to pay less for it. Few know or care where their fuel or power comes from. So for years energy companies believed that...

This paper analyses the pass-through rates and their determinants of the temporary German fuel discount in 2022 at its start and its termination. Based on a unique dataset of fuel station characteristics and prices, we employ a Regression Discontinuity in Time (RDiT) methodology to estimate...

We investigate a Cournot model with strategic R&D investments wherein efficient low-cost firms compete against less efficient high-cost firms. We find that an increase in the number of high-cost firms can stimulate R&D by the low-cost firms, while it always reduces R&D by the high-cost firms....

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

Brander and Lewis argue in a seminal paper (AER, 1986) that a firm's debt-equity ratio should have important strategic effects on product market competition. We test their model in a duopoly experiment under both, Bertrand and Cournot competition. We find that leverage has strategic effects, but...

Merger value is frequently evaluated in single market contexts without considering possible gains stemming from firms' multimarket presence. This study concentrates on the question through which channels, and of which magnitude, mergers among multimarket firms create incremental value. We...

The U.S. and EU Merger Guidelines strongly emphasize the relevance of the "ease of entry" argument in merger evaluations. Up to now, very little is known empirically about how mergers affect entry and exit, and the resulting number of firms in the markets. We empirically test this aspect of...

The intercity bus market in Germany was deregulated in 2013. As a consequence, there is now a dense network of intercity bus lines. For the first time, the German state-owned railway company Deutsche Bahn AG faces intermodal competition in public intercity passenger land transport on a large...