The economic analysis of trade-secret protection has traditionally focused on the interests of companies to conceal information from competitors in order to gain a competitive advantage through trade-secret law. This has neglected cases in which the interest is not in concealing information from...

The standard model by Laffont, Rey and Tirole (1998) treats termination fees as an instrument to increase market power in a one-shot game of horizontal product differentiation. We offer an alternative view in an infinitely repeated Bertrand competition. We focus on symmetrical calling patterns...

The seasonal demand for natural gas requires supply flexibility. This "swing" is now largely provided in northwestern Europe by indigenous production. Declining reserves will increase the dependency on imports from far-off sources, which are less flexible. Hence, flexibility must be provided by...

While humans often care about sunk investment, animals are not subject to this sort of sunk cost behavior or "Concorde fallacy." This paper investigates a simple two stage decision problem under uncertainty. At the second stage, subjects can commit the Concorde fallacy by sticking to the first...

Competition between parallel infrastructures incorporates opposing welfare effects. The gain from reduced deadweight loss might be outweighed by the inefficient duplication of an existing infrastructure. Using data from broadband internet access for Western Europe 2000-2004, this paper...

Ramsey-Boiteux prices and monopoly prices are frequently regarded as being similar. This might suggest that, in particular in network industries with large fixed costs, sometimes monopoly pricing is close to the Ramsey-Boiteux second best and welfare superior to imperfectly regulated prices....

In some markets vertically integrated firms sell directly to final customers hut also to independent downstream firms with whom they then compete on the downstream market. It is often argued that resellers intensify competition and benefit consumers, in particular when wholesale prices are...

We study an industry in which an upstream monopolist supplies an essential input at a regulated price to several downstream firms. Legal unbundling means that a downstream firm owns the upstream firm but this upstream firm is legally independent and maximizes its own upstream profits. We allow...

Linear demand formulations for price competition in horizontally differentiated products are sometimes used to compare situations where additional varieties become available, e.g. due to market entry of new firms. We derive a consistent demand system to analyze such situations and highlight...