Like most pricing practices, loyalty rebates may benefit or harm consumers according to the circumstances. In this essay, I review the pro- competitive and anticompetitive motives for loyalty rebates. Several conclusions emerge. First, every particular type of loyalty rebates can in some...

Au cours des dernières années, le prix de l'électricité sur le marché libre a augmenté en France autant que chez nos voisins, alors que les coûts de la production française, principalement nucléaire, n'ont été que peu affectés par le renchérissement des énergies fossiles. Comment...

Tying a good produced monopolistically with a complementary good produced in an oligopolistic market in which there is room for collusion can be profitable if some buyers of the oligopoly good have no demand for the monopoly good. The reason is that a tie makes part of the demand in the...

A firm may decide to have some of its customers sign exclusive contracts in order to deprive a rival of the minimum viable size, exclude it from the market, and enjoy increased market power. If contracts are required to be simple enough, this strategy may induce inefficient exclusion even if the...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of changes in the intensity of product market competition. The focus is on the interaction between imperfect competition in product markets and bargaining in the labor market. The main result is that, while a uniform intensification of product market...