It has been documented that retail gasoline prices respond more quickly to increases in wholesale price than to decreases. However, there is very little theoretical or empirical evidence identifying the market characteristics responsible for this behavior. This paper presents a new theoretical...

Although antitrust courts sometimes stress the competitive process, they have not deeply explored what that process is. Inspired by the theory of the core, we explore the idea that the competitive process is the process of sellers and buyers forming improving coalitions. Much of antitrust can be...

We examine the effects of market structure and the internal organization of firms on equilibrium R&D projects. We compare a monopolist’s choice of R&D portfolio to that of a welfare maximizer. We next show that Sah and Stiglitz’s finding that the market portfolio of R&D is...

Over the past forty years, there has been a remarkable transformation in horizontal merger enforcement in the United States. With no change in the underlying statute, the Clayton Act, there has been a dramatic decline in the weight given to market concentration by the federal courts and by the...

Predation occurs when a firm offers consumers favorable deals, usually in the short run, that get rid of competition and thereby harm consumers in the long run. Modern economic theory has shown how commitment or collective-action problems among consumers can lead to such paradoxical effects. But...

The open source movement evolved in the one industrial context where openness is not required by intellectual property law.1 Nevertheless, openness itself cannot be the driving force behind the open source movement. This is because openness can be achieved in many ways other than the GPL, for...

Most insurance premiums are only weakly linked to mileage, and have largely lump-sum characteristics. The probable result is too many accidents and too much driving from the standpoint of economic efficiency. This paper develops a model of the relationship between driving and accidents that...

This paper studies royalty negotiations between a patent holder and a downstream firm selling a product which is more valuable if it includes a feature covered by the patent. Royalties are negotiated in the shadow of patent litigation, which will determine whether or not the patent is valid and...

Argentina’s money and banking system was hit hard by the Great Depression. The banking sector was awash with bad assets that built up in the 1920s. Gold convertibility was suspended in December 1929, even before the crisis seriously damaged the core economies. Commonly, these events are...

The United States deficit on current account, now running at an annual rate of over $700 billion, has reached levels (as a percent of U.S. GDP) not seen since the first decades of the nineteenth century. The deficit is soaking up roughly three-quarters of the world's available external...