The literature on the effects of market concentration in platform industries or two-sided markets often compares the competitive outcome against a benchmark. This benchmark is either the “joint management” solution in which one decision maker runs all platforms or a “pure” monopoly with...

Abstract In a 2006 paper, Graeme Guthrie underlined that “[T]he impact of access price level on investment is not yet fully understood” and that “even less is known about the overall impact on welfare” (Guthrie 2006, p. 965). Although important progress has been made on the former issue,...

Mandatory network unbundling is perhaps one of the foremost topics in regulatory economics today. The concept has crucial importance in the deregulation of many previously regulated industries including telecommunications, gas, electricity and railroads. Moreover, the topic has emerged as one of...

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...

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...

In telecommunications some operators have deployed their own networks whereas others have not. The latter firms must purchase wholesale products from the former to be able to compete on the final market. We show that, even when network operators compete in prices and offer homogenous products on...

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 compares, in a polluting oligopoly, an emission tax and a form of environmental policy called voluntary agreement (va). The output contraction resulting from the tax amplifies the distortion due to imperfect competition making the tax sub-optimal. The va studied here is a...

Interconnection rates are a key variable in telecommunications markets. Every call that is placed must be terminated by the network of the receiving party, thus the termination end has the characteristic of an economic bottleneck and is subject to regulation in many countries. This paper...

This paper models competition between two firms, which provide broadband Internet access in regional markets with different population densities. The firms, an incumbent and an entrant, differ in two ways. First, consumers bear costs when switching to the entrant. Second, the entrant faces a...