We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis of...

This paper addresses the impact of payment systems on the rate of technology adoption. We present a model where technological shift is driven by demand uncertainty, increased patients’ benefit, financial variables, and the reimbursement system to providers. Two payment systems are studied:...

The European Commission (EC) has long intended to play a leadership role in setting a pan-European competition policy; yet, both centralized and decentralized tendencies have been manifest in the European context for competition policy. It is not clear the whether these leadership intentions...

A country' s competition agency is transversal in the sense of being active in the whole economy. We study the interaction between the competition agency and sectoral regulators and establish a scope for sectoral regulators to crowd out each other 's efforts: More effort on monitoring...

We address the question of how a third-party payer (e.g. an insurer) decides what providers to contract with. Two different mechanisms are studied and their properties compared. A first mechanism consists in the third party payer setting up a bargaining procedure with both providers. The second...

The interpretation of the loss of utility as transport costs in address models of differentiation poses a methodological difficulty. Transport costs implicitly amounts to assume that there is a good neither included in the differentiated sector nor in the composite (numeraire) good of the...

This paper addresses the impact of payment systems on the rate of technology adoption. We present a model where technological shift is driven by demand uncertainty, increased patients benefit, financial variables, and the reimbursement system to providers. Two payment systems are studied: cost...

In several instances, third-party payers negotiate prices of health care services with providers. We show that a third-party payer may prefer to deal with a professional association than with the sub-set constituted by the more efficient providers, and then apply the same price to all providers....

The paper offers an overview of the literature on bundling in the telecommunications sector and its application in the Spanish market. We argue that the use of bundling in the provision of services is associated to technological reasons. Therefore, there appears no need to regulate bundling...

This paper aims at assessing the importance of the initial technological endowments when firms decide to create R&D agreements. We study a Bertrand duopoly where firms evaluate the returns of an agreement according to its length. A learning process allows us to depict a close connection between...