This paper highlights the strategic role that private quality standards play in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the producers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric...

We show how a brand manufacturer’s control over retail prices can lead to efficiencies when consumers rely on prices as a signal of quality. For this we first show how higher prices can be associated with both higher quality perception as well as higher actual quality. We next identify a...

Alliances between competitors where an established firm provides access to its marketing and distribution channels are an important real-world phenomenon. We analyze a market where an established firm, firm A, produces a product of well-known quality, and a firm with an unknown brand, firm B,...

This paper highlights the strategic role that private quality standards play in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the producers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric...

We study how buyer power affects producers' incentives to share information with retailers. Adopting the Bayesian persuasion framework, we show that full information disclosure is optimal only when buyer power is sufficiently low. Using the presence of retail price recommendations as the proxy...

Trademark law’s current conception of information and how trademarks enable information transmission is underdeveloped. It has led to a world where trademark law hinders rather than “fosters the flow of information in markets.” Instead of promoting information exchange across and within...

The vertical/horizontal distinction is an important feature of modern competition law.This paper will first examine the genealogy of the vertical/horizontal dichotomy in the United States (US) and in European Communities (EC) competition law. It will then analyse the application of the dichotomy...

The past decade has seen growing antitrust concerns about the impact of private label goods on consumer welfare and competition in the grocery trade. Market investigations of the sector have been launched in several Member States, and there have also been legislative attempts to curb the power...

We consider a model of a monopolistic network operator who sequentially offers two-parted access charges to symmetric downstream firms. We are particularly interested in analyzing an alternative to current regulatory practice of prescribing access. In particular, we look at the possibility of...

In many capital-intensive markets, sellers sign long-term contracts with buyers before committing to sunk cost investments. Ex-ante contracts mitigate the risk of under-investment arising from ex-post bargaining. However, contractual rigidities reduce the ability of firms to respond flexibly to...