We analyze the effects of structural remedies on merger activity in a Cournot oligopoly when the antitrust agency applies a consumer surplus standard. Remedies increase the scope for profitable and acceptable mergers, while divestitures to an entrant firm are most effective in this regard....

This paper experimentally analyzes the cartel coordination challenge induced by the discrimination of cartel ringleaders in leniency policies. Ringleaders often take a leading role in the coordination and formation of a cartel. A leniency policy which grants amnesty to all "whistleblowers"...

When sellers join a platform to sell their products, the platform operator may restrict their strategic decisions. In fact, several platform operators impose most-favored treatment or no-discrimination rules (NDRs), asking sellers not to offer better sales conditions elsewhere. In this paper, I...

We consider a monopolistic supplier's optimal choice of wholesale tariffs when downstream firms are privately informed about their retail costs. Under discriminatory pricing, downstream firms that differ in their ex ante distribution of retail costs are offered different tariffs. Under uniform...

Retailer bargaining power is an important aspect of many international antitrust investigations. Size and market share analysis are often the cornerstones of bargaining power identification. However, other factors, like consumer behavior, i.e. "one-stop shopping", can heavily affect the...

We study sequential bargaining between two unions and a single firm. Parties bargain bilaterally and efficiently (over wage and employment). The unions' workforces can be substitutable ("tariff competition") or complementary ("tariff plurality" or "craft unionism"). If unions are substitutable,...

This paper studies the impact of a dominant firm's conditional discounts on competitors' learning-by-doing. In a vertical context where a dominant upstream supplier and a competitive fringe sell their products to a single downstream firm, we analyze whether the dominant supplier prefers to off...

This paper studies the institutional design of newspaper and periodical wholesale. Motivated by recent developments in Germany, we compare the efficiency properties of two alternative regimes for determining the wholesale margins: collective bargaining (as practised in Germany for the last...

The literature on the licensing of an innovation has mainly focused on some specific contract types. We show within the framework of a fairly general model that removing these contractual limitations will lead to extreme market outcomes. Specifically, we find that when the patentee can employ...

This article provides a framework for the analysis of cartel formation. It models the strategic interaction among firms who invest into production capacity, sell a near-homogeneous good, and are subject to unexpected demand shocks with persistence. The firms either compete or collude in prices....