Credit card rebates, which are paid to all credit card users regardless of borrowing, have grown substantially. This paper analyzes the optimal interchange fees in credit cards relative to the interchange fees in debit cards. Compared to debit cards, credit cards raise efficiency by allowing...

TNF-alpha inhibitors represent one of the most important areas of biopharmaceuticals by sales, with three blockbusters accounting for 8 per cent of total pharmaceutical sale in Norway. Novelty of the paper is to examine, with the use of a unique natural policy experiment in Norway, to what...

The countervailing power of large buyers subdues the market power of sellers, but price concessions won by large buyers in upstream markets may or may not translate into lower prices downstream. This paper presents a model in which upstream price concessions leads to lower downstream prices. In...

We present a model of endogenous formation of R&D agreements among firms in which also the timing of R&D investment is made endogenous. The purpose is to bridge two usually separate streams of literature, the noncooperative formation of R&D alliances and the endogenous timing literature. Our...

In an original data set of goods listed for sale online, I observe that both auctions and posted prices are popular with buyers and sellers in the compact-disc market. To explain why these two mechanisms coexist, I estimate a structural model of competing sellers who differ in the value of their...

This article analyses the capacity-then-price game for a duopoly market. We add to the literature by explicitly taking product differentiation into account. We study the impact of capacity costs, demand uncertainty, and vertical and horizontal product differentiation on equilibrium capacities,...

We examine the price decisions in a vertically differentiated duopoly where the decision to buy a good depends not only upon the intrinsic utility from consuming it but also upon the social attributes (prestige, uniqueness etc) associated with its consumption. These social attributes are...

This paper draws upon Feenstra and Ma (2007, 2008), to develop a model of asymmetric competition between multiproduct firms. The model is used to analyze how cost asymmetry affects the equilibrium, with determination of quantity/price as well as product scope per firm. By treating the number of...

This paper builds a general oligopolistic equilibrium model to investigate how within-sector firm heterogeneities affect wage rate, country-wide profits, and welfare. Using linear inverse demands, I consider asymmetric sectors, each involving n Cournot oligopolists producing horizontally...

Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex-post evidence, however, suggests that not always these effects take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects....