In liberalized electricity markets strategic firms compete in an environment characterized by fluctuating demand and non-storability of electricity. While spot market design under those conditions by now is well understood, a rigorous analysis of investment incentives is still missing. Existing...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view....

This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, forthcoming). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance...

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium amount of entertainment in news coverage of newspapers and television stations. We find that a shift in the inclination to read, expressed by a shift in the (psychological) distance costs, induces both media outlets to incorporate more entertaining...

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

Antitrust scholars have argued that exclusive contracts have anticompetitive, or at best neutral effects, if no efficiencies are generated. In contrast, this paper shows that exclusive contracts can have procompetitive effects, provided buyers are imperfect downstream competitors and contract...

Die Finanzstruktur eines Unternehmens beeinflußt dessen Wettbewerbs verhalten auf dem Gütermarkt. Dieser Sachverhalt wird im Rahmen von industrieökonomischen Oligopolmodellen aufgezeigt, in denen die Aufnahme von Fremdkapital eine strategische Verpflichtung der Unternehmen für eine bestimmte...

This paper analyzes the influence of Information structure on the process of knowledge accumulation in a differential game of duopolistic R&D competition. By comparing open-loop and feedback Nash equilibria, representing imperfect and perfect information structures, we show that in the feedback...

How do financial constraints influence innovative activities of firms? In a two-period model of price competition with differentiated products we first analyze the incentives to innovate when both firms are self-financed. We then assume that one of the firms is financially constrained and...