This paper examines the consequences of introducing mobile number portability (MNP). As MNP allows consumers to keep their telephone number when switching providers, it reduces consumers' switching costs. However, MNP may also cause consumer ignorance if telephone numbers no longer identify...

We consider a therapeutic market with potentially three pharmaceutical firms. Two of the firms offer horizontally differentiated brand-name drugs. One of the brand-name drugs is a new treatment under patent protection that will be introduced if the profits are sufficient to cover the entry...

We study the relationship between regulatory regimes and pharmaceutical firms' pricing strategies using a unique policy experiment from Norway, which in 2003 introduced a reference price (RP) system called index pricing for a sub-sample of off-patent pharmaceuticals, replacing the existing price...

Using a Cournot oligopoly model with an endogenous number of firms and evasion of indirect taxes, this paper shows that more intense competition may have the negative side-effect of eroding tax revenues by increasing tax evasion. This will be the case if market entry costs decrease. A similar...

This paper studies competition in prices and opening hours in a model with free entry. It is shown that under free competition a market failure arises: Entry is excessive and opening hours are under-provided. Restrictions on opening hours aggravate this failure. I analyze the impact of a...

We investigate the effect of competition on quality in regulated markets (e.g., health care, higher education, public utilities), using a Hotelling framework, in the presence of sluggish demand. We take a differential-game approach, and derive the open-loop solution (providers choose the optimal...

This paper shows that generators exercised increasing market power in the England and Wales wholesale electricity market in the second half of the 1990s despite declining market concentration. It examines whether this was consistent with static, non-cooperative oligopoly models, which are widely...

It has been argued that cognitively constrained consumers respond sub-optimally to complex decision problems, and that firms can exploit these limitations by introducing spurious complexity into tariff structures, weakening price competition. We model a countervailing force. Restricting one's...

This paper compares the outcomes of corporate self-regulation and traditional ex-ante regulation of network access to monopolistic bottlenecks. In the model of self-regulation, the domestic gas supplier and network owner and the monopsonistic gas customer fix quantities and the network access...

Die Einführung neuer Endkundentarife für den festen Internetzugang durch die Deutsche Telekom hat die Netzneutralitätsdebatte erneut befeuert. Dabei geht es um die Frage, ob Endkundenanbieter bei der Übertragung von Daten im Internet bestimmte Dienste oder Inhalte gegen ein vom Sender oder...