Investment in information acquisition can be used strategically by banks as a commitment device to augment market power. A static two-period economy with informationally heterogeneous banks is analysed. Information acquisition limits asymmetries of information and competitors' rents ex post. If...

This study examines the competitive price effect of Wal-Mart Supercenters on national brand and private label grocery prices in New England. For this purpose, we use primary price data collected on a basket of identical products from six Supercenters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode...

We consider the plant location decision of a multinational corporation (MNC), which has the option to invest in a more or in a less technologically lagging country, and which aims to use its foreign plant as an export-platform. We show that the plant location decision of the MNC depends on...

While competition between firms producing substitutes is well understood, less is known about rivalry between complementors. We study the interaction between firms in markets with one-way essential complements. One good is essential to the use of the other but not vice versa, as arises with an...

The recent literature on oligopolistic third-degree price discrimination has been primarily concerned with rival firms' incentives to acquire customer-specific information and the consequences of such information on firm profitability and welfare. This literature has taken mostly a static view...

We study the impact of the urban location of one single public facility on spatial competition agrave; la Hotelling. If transportation costs are very low compared to the value of the public service then both firms tacitly choose the facility location without moderation of price competition, in...

In early 2004, the U.S. Government initiated the Medicare Discount Drug Card Program, under which a large amount of pharmacy-level price data pertaining to over 800 drugs has been released weekly on the Medicare Web site continuously between May 29, 2004 and October 2005. This extensive...

We introduce a flexible framework by modeling the information firms possess about consumers' locations (preferences) on the Salop circle as a partition. Higher information quality is translated into a partition refinement. In the limit, we obtain the perfect price discrimination paradigm. We...

In view of the uncertainty over the ability of merging firms to achieve efficiency gains, we model the post-merger situation as a Cournot oligopoly wherein the outsiders face uncertainty about the merged entity's final cost. At the Bayesian equilibrium, a bilateral merger is profitable provided...

The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of competition, both internal and external, and of the business cycle on monopolistic markups in the Polish economy. The results show that there are significant markups in several sectors of the economy which complies with earlier estimations by the...