Experimental evidence stresses the importance of so-called social preferences for understanding economic behavior. Social preferences are defined over the entire allocation in a given economic environment, and not just over one's own consumption as is traditionally presumed. We study the...

We provide a novel explanation as to why forming an alliance of buyers (or sellers) across separate markets can be advantageous when input prices are determined by bargaining. Our explanation helps to understand the prevalence of buyer cooperatives among small and medium sized firms.

This paper investigates the effects of industry-wide unions and employers. associations in a duopolistic industry. Using an efficient bargaining model, we show that it is profitable for workers to form an industry union if firms produce goods that are substitutes. In our model industry-wide...

We study tacit collusion in repeated auctions in which bidders can only observe past winners and not their bids. We adopt a stringent interpretation of tacit collusion as collusion without communication about strategies that we model as a symmetry restriction on repeated game strategies:...

We propose a solution for bargaining problems where coalitions are bargainers. The solution generalizes the Nash solution and allows one to interpret a coalition as an institutional player whose preferences are obtained by aggregating the preferences of the individual members. One implication of...

The paper shows that integrating two players on the same side of two independent bilateral monopoly markets can increase their bargaining power. A leading example of such a situation is bargaining between cable operators and broadcasters regarding the carriage of broadcasters. signals on cable...

We study collusion in repeated first-price auctions under the condition of minimal information release by the auctioneer. In each auction a bidder only learns whether or not he won the object. Bidders do not observe other bidders’ bids, who participates or who wins in case they are not the...

We develop a model in which a profit-maximizing monopolist with uncertain cost of production sells to loss-averse, yet rational, consumers. We first introduce (portable) techniques for analyzing the demand of such consumers, and then investigate the monopolist's pricing strategy. Compared to...

Merger activity is intense during economic booms and subdued during recessions. This paper provides a non-financial explanation for this observable pattern. We construct a model in which the target—by setting the takeover price—screens the acquirer on his (expected) ability to realize...

This paper studies the effects of integration among downstream local distributors on the entry of upstream producers in a bargaining theoretic framework. We show that integration of downstream distributors may increase their bargaining power vis-à-vis upstream producers and thus lower...