Trade unions are often argued to cause allocative inefficiencies and to lower welfare. We analyze whether this evaluation is also justified in a Cournot-oligopoly with free but costly entry. If input markets are competitive and output per firm declines with the number of firms (business...

Trade unions are often argued to cause allocative inefficiencies and to lower welfare. We analyze whether this evaluation is also justified in a Cournot-oligopoly with free but costly entry. If input markets are competitive and output per firm declines with the number of firms (business...

This paper studies the relationship between wages and the degree of firm heterogeneity in a given industry under different wage setting structures. To derive testable hypotheses, we set up a theoretical model that analyses the sensitivity of wages to the variability in productivity conditions in...

We study the incentives of oligoplistic firms to share private information on demand parameters. Differently from previous studies, we consider bilateral sharing agreements, by which firms commit at the ex-ante stage to truthfully share information. We show that if signals are i.i.d., then...

We study the problem of information sharing in oligopoly, when sharing decisions are taken before the realization of private signals. Using the general model developed by Raith (1996), we show that if firms are allowed to make bilateral exclusive sharing agreements, then some degree of...

This paper further develops the standard modelling of information exchange between firms in the presence of cost uncertainty. In order to avoid consistency problems, we replace the normal distribution of the random variables, commonly used because of its convenient mathematical properties, by an...

This paper shows the strategic aspects of international outsourcing in a duopolistic market. Due to different costs of integrated production and outsourcing, the choice of a firm influences the strategy of the competitor via the output price. Therefore, the resulting market constellation depends...

In his book on 'Market Microstructure' Spulber presented some strange results with respect to the impact of the substitutability parameter in an intermediation model with differentiated products and inputs. Intuitively, effects in the product and the input market should be similar: if firms...

Using a model with switching costs it is shown that firms may have an incentive to set up a new firm supplying to the same market under quite general conditions. The new firm attracts some market share of the founding firm. The start up firm is thus an act of cannibalization. Moreover, entry of...

Do firms under relative payoffs maximizing (RPM) behavior always choose a strategy profile that results in tougher competition compared to firms under absolute payoffs maximizing (APM) behavior? In this paper we will address this issue through a simple model of symmetric oligopoly where firms...