We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider’s incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide...

We examine the interplay of endogenous vertical integration and cost-reducing downstream investment in successive oligopoly. We start from a linear Cournot model to motivate our more general reduced-form framework. For this general framework, we establish the following main results: First,...

We examine vertical backward integration in a reduced-form model of successive oligopolies. Our key findings are: (i) There may be asymmetric equilibria where some firms integrate and others remain separated, even if firms are symmetric initially; (ii) Efficient firms are more likely to...

We investigate how various institutional settings affect a network provider's incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. Under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives turn out to be smaller under vertical separation than under vertical integration, though we also provide...

We examine vertical backward integration in a reduced-form model of successive oligopolies. Our key findings are: (i) There may be asymmetric equilibria where some firms integrate and others remain separated, even if firms are symmetric initially; (ii) Efficient firms are more likely to...

This paper studies a network provider's incentives to invest in infrastructure quality. In a simple but general framework, we investigate how various institutional settings affect investment incentives. We show that under reasonable assumptions on demand, investment incentives are smaller under...