We examine retail gasoline station pricing using three years of weekly prices for 272 stations in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. We report a number of new empirical findings about station level pricing and describe how these findings relate to existing models of retail pricing. First,...

Studies of gasoline prices in multiple countries have found a repeated sequence of asymmetric cycles where a sharp price increase is followed by gradual decreases. This price pattern is linked to Maskin & Tirole's (1988) theoretical duopoly pricing game that produces a similar pattern, Edgeworth...

Slotting contracts involve manufacturer payments to retailers for shelf space. Slotting contracts are an important part of the competitive process in many product markets. While slotting contracts have been the subject of congressional hearings, agency investigations, antitrust litigation, and...

Die aktuelle Diskussion um die Novellierung der deutschen Pressefusionskontrolle macht deutlich, welche Relevanz medienökonomische Fragestellungen haben. Was jedoch bei dieser Diskussion häufig vernachlässigt wird, ist die intensive Betrachtung der Ökonomischen Besonderheiten von...

Bei Verstößen gegen geltendes Wettbewerbsrecht entstehen typischerweise Schäden durch überhöhte Preise und entgangenen Gewinn bei nachgelagerten Wirtschaftsstufen. Hierfür besteht ein gesetzlicher Schadensersatzanspruch. Auf europäischer Ebene wird derzeit ein Rechtsrahmen diskutiert, mit...

This paper contains an economic and legal analysis of the lawsuit Microsoft vs. U.S. Department of Justice beginning with the District Court's decision on June 7, 2000 up to the Proposed Final Judgement on November 6, 2001. I found that the courts' underlying economic paradigm regarding the...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry - the videogame market - which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry-the videogame market- which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...

This paper empirically evaluates the effects of a merger between the two largest book retail chains in the UK. We build an original dataset of book titles with data on the prices at the store level and at the national level. We then apply difference-in-differences techniques to assess the impact...