Sample-survey information is used to assess aspects of the predictive competence of the transaction-cost paradigm. The extent of vertical disintegration by oil companies in offshore oil gathering is shown to be consistent with the revealed efficacy of the markets in intermediate goods and...

We analyze the competitive e?ects of backward vertical integration by a partially vertically integrated ?rm that competes with non-integrated ?rms both upstream and downstream. We show that vertical integration is procompetitive under fairly general conditions. It can be anticompetitive only if...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of technology and spatial agglomeration in decisions about vertical integration. It starts from the hypothesis that the business group, defined as a set of firms under common ownership and control, is the appropriate unit to delimit the firm's...

I develop a property rights theory of the firm in which managers bargain over the sharing of quasi-rents in the presence of private information. I analyse the interdependence between the ownership structure of firms and the bargaining inefficiency that is due to the presence of private...

Many high technology goods are based on standards that require access to several patents that are owned by different IP holders. We investigate the royalties chosen by IP holders under different market structures. Vertical integration of an IP holder and a downstream producer solves the double...

It is well known that patent pools can enhance efficiency by eliminating the complements problem. This paper investigates how the presence of vertically integrated firms affects the economic impact of a patent pool. Without a patent pool, the presence of integrated firms may either increase or...

In this paper, we propose a model that provides an interpretation to the high concentration of the retail industry in the convenience goods market by comparing the incentives to merge of producers to those of retailers.

We study the incentives for a “diagonal” merger between two Internet Service Providers, one a wireless retail only ISP in two origination markets, and the second a vertically integrated wired retailer in one market and an upstream provider in the other. The merger’s effects depend on...

This paper provides a simple model of bargaining and integration within a network and considers how intra-network structure is impacted on by competition between networks. Apart from its analytical tractability, our model demonstrates how integration can be used strategically to redistribute...