The Russian economy relies on the Russian freight railways to an extraordinary degree. In 2001, after years of debate, the Russian government adopted an ambitious plan to transform this vertically integrated, government owned monopoly into a system that would rely more on private investment and...

We model a “new economy” industry where innovation is sequential and monopoly is persistent but the incumbent turns over periodically. In this setting we analyze the effects of “extraction” (e.g., price discrimination that captures greater surplus) and “extension” (conduct that...

Information frictions play a key role in a wide array of economic environments and are frequently incorporated into formal models as search costs. Yet, as search costs are typically unobserved, little empirical work investigates the determinants of the distribution of consumer search costs and...

I extend the oligopoly model of Allaz and Vila (1993) to explore how forward contracting affects the adverse welfare consequences of horizontal mergers. I derive a welfare statistic that, within the context of the model, is free of structural parameters. The statistic allows for conclusions that...

We show that, in general, consistent estimates of cost pass-through are not obtained from reduced-form regressions of price on cost. We derive a formal approximation for the bias that arises even under standard orthogonality conditions. We provide guidance on the conditions under which bias may...

A leading explanation for price dispersion in posted-price markets is search costs. We incorporate this insight into a model of competing second-price auctions similar to eBay. By doing so, we extend the narrow literature on competing auctions to capture price dispersion, and grow the already...

We demonstrate that cost pass-through can be used to inform demand calibration, potentially eliminating the need for data on margins, diversion, or both. We derive the relationship between cost pass-through and consumer demand using a general oligopoly model of Nash-Bertrand competition and...

In markets for experience or credence goods adverse selection can drive out higher quality products and services. This negative implication of asymmetric information about product quality for trading and welfare, poses the question of how such markets first originate. We consider a market in...

We show how observed product margins may be used in lieu of an observed market elasticity to calibrate parameters for two commonly used demand forms: the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) and the multinomial logit. This technique is useful for antitrust practitioners interested in simulating the...