Very few industries are as profoundly influenced by regulation as the pharmaceutical industry. All aspects of the life-cycle of new drugs are regulated, from patent application, to marketing approval, commercial exploitation, patent expiration and competition with generics. The nature of demand...

I present a model in which individuals compete for a prize by choosing to apply or not. Abilities are private information and in attempt to select the best candidate, the committee compares applicants with an imperfect technology. The choice of application cost, size of the prize and use of...

In an industry where regulated firms interact with unregulated suppliers, we investigate the welfare effects of a merger between regulated firms when cost synergies are uncertain before the merger and their realization becomes private information of the merged firm. The optimal merger policy...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

Riley (1979)'s reactive equilibrium concept addresses problems of equilibrium existence in competitive markets with adverse selection. The game-theoretic interpretation of the reactive equilibrium concept in Engers and Fernandez (1987) yields the Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976)/Riley (1979)...

We consider a general class of imperfectly discriminating contests with privately informed players. We show that findings by Athey (2001) imply the existence of a Bayesian Nash equilibrium in monotone pure strategies.

Crowdfunding has mostly been used to finance very unique projects. Recently, however, companies have begun using it to finance more traditional products where they compete against other sellers of similar products. Major crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as Amazon have...

Der Wettbewerb im deutschen Gesundheitswesen ist - vor allem zwischen den Leistungserbringern - trotz diverser Reformen nicht sehr ausgeprägt. Inzwischen gibt es zwar die Möglichkeit, individuelle Verträge zwischen einzelnen Anbietern und den Krankenkassen abzuschließen, dies wird aber kaum...

Die Vorschläge der Monopolkommission zur Ausweitung des Wettbewerbs um Bestandskunden in der Privaten Krankenversicherung (PKV) sowie die daran geäußerte Kritik werden vorgestellt und einer Analyse unterzogen. Es wird deutlich, dass die Übertragbarkeit einer risikogerechten Alterungsr...

Vor mehr als fünf Jahren wurde der Gesundheitsfonds eingeführt, verbunden mit der Erwartung, dass mehr Gerechtigkeit und Wettbewerb in das Krankenversicherungssystem Einzug hielte. Vor allem der erhoffte Übergang vom Preis- zum Qualitätswettbewerb ist aber offenbar nicht gelungen. Der...