The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has powers under the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cwlth) to accept undertakings from industry participants interested in taking actions, such as mergers, that may potentially be anticompetitive. This paper analyses the role of undertakings,...

This paper re-examines the literature on optimal penalties and the allocation of resources to enforcement from the viewpoint of incentive theory. It is assumed that an agent might perform a socially harmful act. In contrast to previous analyses, the agent might also perform profit-enhancing...

When do scientists and other innovators organize into collaborative teams, and why do they do so for some projects and not others? At the core of this important organizational choice is, we argue, a tradeoff scientists make between the productive efficiency of collaboration and the credit...

Local number portability (LNP) is a key factor in the promotion of local call competition in telecommunications. By allowing a consumer to retain their number when moving between local telephone providers, LNP reduces customers' switching costs and makes it easier for new providers to compete...

This paper reconsiders the result of Stole and Zwiebel (1996) that when a firm bargains with its workers over the wages in non-binding contracts, the firm will over-employ workers to reduce the hold-up power of any one. This result has stood in contrast to conclusions drawn in the literature on...

Recent trade practices decisions in Australia emphasise a structural approach to market power. Modern economic analysis, however, highlights situations where firms that currently lack 'structural' market power may engage in strategic behaviour aimed at altering market structure. Such firms have...

This paper examines mechanisms that can resolve ownership disputes where the agents involve know who the legitimate owner is but others do not. The mechanism proposed is called ``Solomonic" because it resolves the biblical dispute facing King Solomon over the true mother of a baby. The mechanism...

The business model of commercial (free-to-air) television relies on advertisers to pay for programming. Viewers 'inadvertently' watch advertisements that are bundled with programming. Advertisers have no reason to pay to have their ads embedded if the viewers succeed in unbundling the...

The prevailing economic theory of the firm, based on a property rights perspective, has demonstrated that ownership by dispensable, outside parties is an inefficient outcome relative to ownership by productive agents. In order to better understand observed patterns of ownership, this paper...

This paper examines an environment where original content can be remixed by follow-on creators. The modelling innovation is to assume that original content creators and remixers can negotiate over the ‘amount’ of original content that is used by the follow-on creator in the shadow of various...