We study the effects of a vertical merger in a setting with a single upstream supplier of a critical input and two downstream customers which compete with each other. Initially, the upstream supplier first announces prices, then the two downstream customers announce their retail prices. We find...

We investigate the possibility for two vertically related firms to at least partially collude on the wholesale price over an infinite horizon to mitigate or eliminate the effects of double marginalisation, thereby avoiding contracts which might not be enforceable. We characterise alternative...

This paper studies the competitive effects of a variety of publicly observable nonlinear contracts and vertical restraints in bilateral duopoly. When suppliers offer menus of contracts and inputs are sufficiently differentiated, there exist equilibria in which both retailers purchase from both...

This article revisits the opportunism problem faced by an upstream monopolist contracting with several retailers over secret agreements, when contracts are linear. We characterize the equilibrium under secret contracts and compare it to that under public contracts in a setting allowing for...

This paper provides an economic analysis of recent vertical and horizontal mergers in the U.S. industry for audiovisual media content, including the AT&T-Time Warner and the Disney-Fox mergers. Using a theory-driven approach, we examine economic effects of these types of mergers on market...

We investigate the effect of a vertical merger on downstream firms' ability to collude in a repeated game framework. We show that a vertical merger has two main effects. On the one hand, it increases the total collusive profits, increasing the stakes of collusion. On the other hand, it creates...

An increasing number of horizontal agreements involve both competitors and their common suppliers (or retailers). As vertical agreements, indirect horizontal agreements can help reduce coordination failures, but they also have the capacity to dampen competition. The negative welfare effect of...

This paper proposes a dynamic approach to modeling opportunism in bilateral vertical contracting between an upstream monopolist and competing downstream firms. Unlike previous literature on opportunism which has focused on games in which the upstream firm makes simultaneous secret offers to the...

In their seminal article on multilateral vertical contracting, McAfee and Schwartz (1994) argue that nondiscrimination clauses may be ineffective in curbing opportunism and may thus have no bite. This begs the question why nondiscrimination clauses are commonly observed in intermediate-goods...

In a two-tier oligopoly, where the downstream firms are locked in pair-wise exclusive relationships with their upstream input suppliers, the equilibrium mode of competition in the downstream market is endogenously determined as a renegotiation-proof contract signed between each downstream firm...