Consumers often have to decide whether to go to a remote store for a lower price. Only the absolute price difference between the stores should be relevant in this case, but several experiments showed that people exhibit "relative thinking": they are affected also by the relative savings...

This paper presents a theory of the market provision of broadcasting and uses it to address the nature of market failure in the industry. Advertising levels may be too low or too high, depending on the nuisance cost to viewers, the substitutability of programs, and the expected benefits to...

We derive bounds on the ratios of deadweight loss and consumer surplus to producer surplus under Cournot competition. To do so, we introduce a parameterization of the degree of curvature of market demand using the parallel concepts of ½-concavity and ½-convexity. The ”more concave” is...

This paper studies the identification of best response functions in binary games without making strong parametric assumptions about the payoffs. The best response function gives the utility maximizing response to a decision of the other players. This is analogous to the response function in the...

When goods are substitutes (complements), we find a clear price (output) ranking across five duopoly markets, namely Cournot, Bertrand, Cournot-Stackelberg, Bertrand-Stackelberg, and joint profit maximization. We explain these rankings in terms of levels of conjectural variation.

This paper evaluates the main measures that have been used to regulate the interconnection prices in the telecommunication sector. We show that many of the regulations that are applying the vast majority of countries have very little theoretical support, and we identify the restrictions that...

Este trabajo analiza los efectos de la imposición directa e indirecta sobre el bienestar social, en un modelo de entrada en el que las empresas practican discriminación espacial de precios. Se muestra que en un oligopolio la imposición directa puede afectar positiva o negativamente al...

This paper derives a Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE) of a pay-as-bid auction, also called discriminatory auction. Such an auction is used in the balancing market for electric power in Britain. For some probability distributions of demand a pure-strategy equilibrium does not exist. If demand...

Producers submit committed supply functions to a procurement auction, e.g. an electricity auction, before the uncertain demand has been realized. In the Supply Function Equilibrium(SFE), every firm chooses the bid maximizing his expected profit given the bids of the competitors. In case of...

Two-sided platform firms serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry, banking, and the software industry. A well known textbook result in one-sided markets is that a government may increase a...