Previous work has shown that state-level antitrust enforcement activity may have impacts on entry and relocation behavior by U.S. firms. Significant state-level antitrust activity may be an indicator of a perceived adverse business environment and it is found to deter establishment entry,...

Institutional barriers to entry were removed to a considerable extent in 1996 in the Dutch retail sector. Three years before that the regulator decided to not take legal actions anymore against entrants violating institutional requirements. In the current analysis we investigate the effects of...

How much does a nation spend on resources to 'grease the wheels of trade'? To examine this question the Dutch economy is used as an exemplary case as the Netherlands are known as a nation of traders. This image was derived in the seventeenth century from successes in long distance trade,...

This paper studies asymmetric price responses of individual firms, via daily retail prices of almost all gasoline stations in the Netherlands and suggested prices of the five largest oil companies over more than two years. I find that 38% of the stations respond asymmetrically to changes in the...

Given various recent antitrust investigations on the retail sector, we deal with uncovering demand systems substitution patterns for a particular market (diapers) to investigate the inter-format competition (supermarkets vs. discounters vs. drugstores). Using the uncovered demand system we...

When sellers join a platform to sell their products, the platform operator may restrict their strategic decisions. In fact, several platform operators impose most-favored treatment or no-discrimination rules (NDRs), asking sellers not to offer better sales conditions elsewhere. In this paper, I...

With the emergence of the internet, the e-commerce grows on daily basis, in Brazil and in the world. In 2007 was still very low by Brazilian trade firms, even considering only firms with 20 or more employees. Only 855 firms adopted this practice in a total of 38.339 firms. The set up of this...

This paper analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm's incentive to provide product quality. In the supermarket industry, product availability is an important measure of quality. Using U.S. consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls, I find that stores facing...

This paper investigates the short- and medium-term effects of the deregulation of shopopening hours legislation on retail employment in Germany. In 2006, the legislative competence was shifted from the federal to the state level, leading to a gradual deregulation of shop opening restrictions in...

We study competition among a score of firms participating in an online market for a commodity computer component. Firms were able to adjust prices continuously; prices determined how the firms were ranked and listed (lowest price listed first), with better ranks contributing to firms' sales....