We analyze a principal-supervisor-two-agent hierarchy with soft information. The supervisor may be inefficient such that a noisy signal on the agents’ effort levels is observed. On one hand, the agents require risk premiums to work due to the noisy signal. On the other hand, the supervisor and...

The European Commission is working on a revision of its Guidelines on Research and Development Agreements. On this occasion, this note surveys the existing experimental evidence. Experiments add a number of additional arguments to the normative assessment. R&D agreements have a much smaller...

Both in the US and in Europe, antitrust authorities prohibit merger not only if the merged entity, in and of itself, is no longer sufficiently controlled by competition. The authorities also intervene if, post merger, the market structure has changed such that "tacit collusion" or "coordinated...

Two suppliers of a homogenous good know that, in the second period, they will be able to collude. Gains from collusion are split according to the Nash bargaining solution. In the first period, either of them is able to invest into process innovation. Innovation changes the status quo pay-off,...