This paper reviews the Israeli credit card industry and discusses in detail the ongoing attempts by the Israeli Antitrust Authority (IAA) to promote competition in the industry. Currently, these attempts had only limited success: there is still little competition both on the issuing and the...

This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. In general, the incentives of firms to collude depend in a complex way on the whole set of partial cross ownership (PCO) in the industry. We show that when firms are identical, only...

This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. In general, the incentives of firms to collude depend in a complex way on the whole set of partial cross ownership (PCO) in the industry. We show that when firms are identical, only...

Partial vertical integration is common in many telecommunication and media markets in Israel. That is, there are many cases in which the supplier of an input holds a partial (often controlling) stake in the input's customer (which we call the “distributor” for concreteness), or the...

This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. In general, the incentives of firms to collude depend in a complex way on the whole set of partial cross ownership (PCO) in the industry. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions...

This paper examines the effects that passive investments in rival firms have on the incentives of firms to engage in tacit collusion. In general, these incentives depend in a complex way on the entire partial cross ownership (PCO) structure in the industry. We establish necessary and sufficient...

Excessive pricing by a dominant firm is unlawful in many countries. To assess whether it is excessive, the dominant firm's price is often compared with price benchmarks. We examine the competitive implications of two such benchmarks: a retrospective benchmark where the price that prevails after...