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...

The antitrust law of bundled discounts is unsettled. LePage's broadly condemned bundled discounts instituted by a dominant firm where it appeared that the discounts served no economic purpose other than to place rival, single product suppliers at a competitive disadvantage. In contrast,...

In this paper we study, as in Jeon-Menicucci (2009), competition between sellers when each of them sells a portfolio of distinct products to a buyer having limited slots. This paper considers sequential pricing and complements our main paper (Jeon- Menicucci, 2009) that considers simultaneous...

Bundling has been regarded as a highly ambiguous method for price discrimination or vertical control. Barry Nalebuff has recently proposed an alternative model of bundling as a highly suspect exclusionary tactic. A virtue of the model is that its exclusionary implications do not appeal to...

In a setting where retailers and suppliers compete for each other by offering binding contracts, exclusivity clauses serve as a competitive device. As a result of these clauses, firms addressed by contracts only accept the most favorable deal. Thus the contract-issuing parties have to squeeze...

I develop a model in the spirit of Ordover, Saloner, and Salop (1990), in which two upstream firms compete to supply a homogeneous input to two downstream firms, who compete in prices with differentiated products in a downstream market. Upstream firms are allowed to offer exclusive two-part...

We provide a framework for analyzing two-sided markets that allows for different degrees of product differentiation on each side of the market. When platforms are viewed as homogenous by sellers but heterogeneous by buyers, we show that competitive bottlenecks arise endogenously. In equilibrium,...

We provide a framework for analyzing two-sided markets that allows for different degrees of product differentiation on each side of the market. When platforms are viewed as homogenous by sellers but heterogeneous by buyers, we show that competitive bottlenecks arise endogenously. In equilibrium,...

This study constructs a model of anticompetitive exclusive-offer competition between two existing upstream firms. Under exclusive-offer competition, the upstream firm's profit depends on the rival’s exclusive offer. If the rival makes an exclusive offer acceptable for the downstream firm, the...