We study antitrust enforcement that channels price-fixing incentives through setting fines and allocating resources to detection activities. Antitrust fines obey four legal principles: punishments should fit the crime, proportionality, bankruptcy considerations, and minimum fines. Bankruptcy...

Cet article réexamine le débat sur l'utilisation du prix et de la publicite comme signaux de qualité, et sur les effets concurrentiels de la publicité. Nous montrons que la publicité a un rôle de signal lorsqu'il y a rivalité en prix entre les entreprises, contrairement à ce que l'on...

The Spanish automobile market of the nineties experienced a perfectly foreseeable tariff dismantling and a strong demand downturn, with the observed result of an apparently sharpened producer competition in products and perhaps in prices. This paper is aimed at testing whether or not there...

This paper derives a Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE) of a pay-as-bid auction, also called discriminatory auction. Such an auction is used in the balancing market for electric power in Britain. For some probability distributions of demand a pure-strategy equilibrium does not exist. If demand...

Producers submit committed supply functions to a procurement auction, e.g. an electricity auction, before the uncertain demand has been realized. In the Supply Function Equilibrium(SFE), every firm chooses the bid maximizing his expected profit given the bids of the competitors. In case of...

We study a market for a homogeneous good in which firms adjust their production decisions on the basis of imitation, learning from own experience, and local experimentation. For any fixed set of firms (more than one), long run behaviour settles on a symmetric marginal-cost pricing equilibrium....

This discussion paper led to an article in <I>Games and Economic Behavior</I> (2012), pp. 120-138.<P> 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,...</p></i>

We present an oligopoly model where a certain fraction of consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover prices. There are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in...

We study a consumer non-sequential search oligopoly model with search cost heterogeneity. We first prove that an equilibrium in mixed strategies always exists. We then examine the nonparametric identification and estimation of the costs of search. We find that the sequence of points on the...

We modify the paper of Stahl (1989) [Stahl, D.O., 1989. Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search. American Economic Review 79, 700–12] by relaxing the assumption that consumers obtain the first price quotation for free. When all price quotations are costly to obtain, the unique...