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 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...

People vote although their marginal gain from voting is zero.We contribute to the resolution of this paradox by presentinga model for equilibrium configuration of attitudes regardingthe decision to vote. Each individual is seen as an element ofa social network, within which pairs of individuals...

We present a model of competition between two advertising-financed media firms when consumers dislike advertising. We apply the model to analyze competition between Internet portals and find that equilibrium prices of advertising are higher the less differentiated the portals are perceived to...

Existence problems have been pervasive in the economics literature on horizontal product differentiation. Adding a directional constraint to a standard Hotelling location model leads to a general result of non-existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Here we present a slightly different...

Existence problems have been pervasive in the economics literature on horizontal product differentiation. Adding a directional constraint to a standard Hotelling location model leads to a general result of non-existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Here we present a slightly different...

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...