Contractual inefficiencies within supply chains increase an input price above its marginal cost, therefore they are considered detrimental to consumer surplus. We argue that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to consumers in quality-differentiated markets where the "finiteness property"...

Double marginalization causes inefficiencies in vertical markets. This paper argues that such inefficiencies may be beneficial to final consumers in markets producing vertically differentiated goods. The rationale behind this result is that enhancing efficiency in high-quality supply chains...

We examine merging firms' additions and removals of products for a sample of 66 mergers across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by merging firms. Merging firms tend to both drop and add products at...

Some scholars have argued that common ownership, which refers to an investor's simultaneous ownership of small stockholdings in several competing companies, is anticompetitive and prohibited by the U.S. antitrust laws. Proponents of this view target in particular large investment managers that...

Health care is one of the most important public policy areas both due to the economic importance of the sector and its impact on individual well-being. Health and hospital services have historically been provided through centralised, highly regulated or non-market means in most OECD countries...

This paper analyzes the endogenous choice of delegation with two firms producing goods of different qualities. We find that an asymmetric delegation structure emerges as the high-quality firm chooses to delegate and low-quality firm chooses non delegation contract under Cournot competition. Even...

This paper revisits a vertically differentiated duopoly game where producers first simultaneously set qualities and then simultaneously set prices. We theoretically and experimentally explore the impact of different consumers’ preferences dispersion levels. We find that firms suboptimally...

This work builds and tests a vertical product differentiation duopoly model, where firms first choose quality and then choose prices, in the lab. We consider both the case in which production costs are unaffected by the quality of the good produced and the case in which production costs increase...

The present paper analyses the effects on social welfare of a partial crossparticipation at ownership level in a differentiated Cournot duopoly. We show that cross-participation, despite the fact it appears as an anti-competitive practice which reduces the degree of market competition, may...