We consider a therapeutic market with potentially three pharmaceutical firms. Two of the firms offer horizontally differentiated brand-name drugs. One of the brand-name drugs is a new treatment under patent protection that will be introduced if the profits are sufficient to cover the entry...

We analyse how a patent-holding pharmaceutical firm may strategically use advertising of existing drugs to affect R&D investments in new (differentiated) drugs, and thereby affect the probability distribution of future market structures in the industry. Within a fairly generalmodel framework, we...

This paper studies the impact of hospital competition on waiting times. We use a Salop-type model, with hospitals that differ in (geographical) location and, potentially, waiting time, and two types of patients; high-benefit patients who choose between neighbouring hospitals (competitive...

A unionised monopoly firm, benefitting from some kind of anti-competitive regulation, and its corresponding trade union have a common interest in spending resources to protect the monopoly rents created by the regulation. In the present paper, a situation in which the unionised monopoly is...

The international integration of regulated markets poses new challenges for regulatory policy. One question is the implications that the overall international regulatory regime will have for cross-border and/or domestic merger activity. In particular, do non-coordinated policies stimulate...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities) taking a di¤erential game approach, in which quality is a stock variable. Using a Hotelling framework, we derive the open-loop solution (providers commit to an...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical firms, we study the effects of a horizontal merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm,...

In a spatial competition setting there is usually a non-negative relationship between competition and quality. In this paper we offer a novel mechanism whereby competition leads to lower quality. This mechanism relies on two key assumptions, namely that the providers are motivated and...

We examine whether and how rainfall shocks affect tariff setting in the agricultural sector. In a model of strategic trade policy, we show that the impact of a negative rainfall shock on optimal import tariffs is generally ambiguous, depending on the weight placed by the domestic policy maker on...

Firms in markets such as health care and education are often profit constrained due to regulation or their non-profit status, and they are often viewed as being altruistic towards consumers. We use a spatial competition framework to study incentives for cost containment and quality provision by...