With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals as...

Holdout problems prevent private (voluntary and self-financing) assembly of complementary goods - such as land or dispersed spectrum - from many self-interested sellers. While mechanisms that fully respect sellers' property rights cannot alleviate these holdout problems, traditional solutions,...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

When successive monopolies transact through noncooperative linear pricing, the resulting double markup decreases their joint profits relative to vertical integration. However, if there are downstream rivals (which are not double marginalized), the same noncooperative interaction often...

Oligopolists look for signals from one another in planning their strategies. Some signals solicit cooperation from rivals and a still smaller number succeed in achieving noncompetitive equilibria. But only a subset of these noncompetitive outcomes involve agreements under Section 1 of the...

Revisions incorporated into the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010 claim that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission consider anticompetitive effects to product “variety” when evaluating mergers. The Guidelines do not, however, explain the methodology or tools that can...

When small liberal arts colleges, particularly those in the Northeastern United States, abolish fraternities and sororities, they may be violating the antitrust laws. Additionally, by removing what may be the only viable competitor for room and board services for students in the small towns that...

This paper presents an analysis of the world iron and steel industry from 1950 to 1980. After presenting a technical overview describing the technological possesses in use during that period by the steel, the iron ore and the ferrous scrap industries, we describe and analyse, on economic...

This paper demonstrates that, under a set of weak assumptions, increased product differentiation will make it more difficult to sustain collusion when it is costly either to coordinate or to maintain collusion. These results contrast with the previous theoretical literature, which shows that, in...

Recent surveys of wheat importers indicate that countries that import wheat via a state-trading enterprise (STE) are less sensitive to quality issues in import decision-making than countries that import wheat through private traders. This study examines conceptually and empirically the impact of...