One of the most important economic strategic sectors in any economy is the electricity market. Its main feature is its oligopolistic character favoured by the returns to scale which act as an entry barrier. As a result, the energy generators can use their power market in order to increase their...

This paper analyzes the determinants of pass-through that are specific to vertical relationships between wholesalers and retailers. Fluctuations in input costs (due to, e.g., exchange rate shocks) are transmitted first to the wholesale price, and then to the retail price. The type of vertical...

Macroeconomists have traditionally ignored the behavior of temporary price markdowns ("sales") by retailers. Although sales are common in the micro price data, they are assumed to be unrelated to macroeconomic phenomena and generally filtered out. We challenge this view. First, using the 1996 -...

This paper studies asymmetric price responses of individual firms, via daily retail prices of almost all gasoline stations in the Netherlands and suggested prices of the five largest oil companies over more than two years. I find that 38% of the stations respond asymmetrically to changes in the...

We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity computer component. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously; prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms' sales....

What is the impact of the increasing dominance of conventional firms in e-commerce? We use a simple model to show that retailers who only sell through Internet have lower on-line prices than retailers who also sell through conventional stores. This proposition is firmly supported by our...

We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit to evaluate how entry regulations affect profitability and market structure in retail. The model incorporates demand and store-level heterogeneity. Based on unique data for all retail food stores in Sweden, we find that the average entry costs...

We analyze the interaction between market structure and market performance and how it varies over the product cycle. To account for the potential endogeneity in this relation, we use an instrumental variable approach. We combine data from the largest Austrian online market for price comparisons...

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of retailers and assigning it to an intermediary increases the value of a supply chain when demand volatility is high. This is because an intermediary can help solve two incentive problems associated with retailers' inventory control...

A human subject laboratory experiment compares the real-time market performance of the two most popular auction formats for online ad space, Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) and Generalized Second Price (GSP). Theoretical predictions made in papers by Varian (2007) and Edelman, et al. (2007) seem to...