Following Bernheim and Whinston (1990), this paper addresses the effects of multimarket contact on firms ability to collude in repeated oligopolies. Managerial incentives, taxation, and financial market imperfections tend to make firms objective function strictly concave in profits and market...

The paper addresses the effects of the separation of ownership and control on long-run competition in oligopolies. It finds that when managers have the preference for smooth time-paths of profits revealed by the evidence on "income smoothing," manager-led firms can sustain any collusive...

We take the view that alternative trading opportunities may influence the loss to delay in a bargaining situation, and show that contractual exclusivity may then be relevant even for ‘internal’ investments, contradicting a recent finding by Segal and Whinston (2000). When a buyer is an...

We propose a theory of anticompetitive effects of debt finance based on the interaction between capital structure, managerial incentives, and firms ability to sustain collusive agreements. Shareholders' commitments not to expropriate debtholders through managers with valuable reputations or...

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009,...

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship between reputation and entry in procurement. There is widespread concern among regulators that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new...

This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship between reputation and entry in procurement. We propose a procurement model with reputation and entry assigning to the entrant a reputational advantage of varying size across treatments. There is widespread...

In most jurisdictions, antitrust fines are based on affected commerce rather than on collusive profits, and in some others, caps on fines are introduced based on total firm sales rather than on affected commerce. We uncover a number of distortions that these policies generate, propose simple...

Based on my recent work with several co-authors this paper explores the relationship between discretion, reputation, competition and entry in procurement markets. I focus especially on public procurement, which is highly regulated for accountability and trade reasons. In Europe regulation...

We study networks of relations - groups of agents linked by several cooperative relationships - exploring equilibrium conditions under different network configurations and information structures. Relationships are the links through which soft information can flow, and the value of a network lies...