We study the welfare effects of non-binding advance price announcements. Applying a differentiated Bertrand model with horizontal products and asymmetric information, we find that such announcements can help firms to gain information on each other thereby allowing them to achieve higher profits....

We investigate the effect of a ban on third-degree price discrimination on the sustainability of collusion. We build a model with two firms that may be able to discriminate between two consumer groups. Two cases are analyzed: (i) Best-response symmetries so that profits in the static Nash...

One of the most controversial theories of harm in competition law in general and within the category of exploitative abuses in particular is excessive prices. While many arguments have been given against excessive price cases, there also exist many arguments in favour of such cases. Furthermore...

We demonstrate that cost pass-through can be used to inform demand calibration, potentially eliminating the need for data on margins, diversion, or both. We derive the relationship between cost pass-through and consumer demand using a general oligopoly model of Nash-Bertrand competition and...

Farrell and Shapiro proposed a simple test of the possible upward pricing pressure (UPP) following a merger. They showed that the test may give false negatives, that is, indicate that a merger may not give an UPP, while a more comprehensive test would indicate the opposite. We show that their...

In this paper we study, as in Jeon-Menicucci (2009), competition between sellers when each of them sells a portfolio of distinct products to a buyer having limited slots. This paper considers sequential pricing and complements our main paper (Jeon- Menicucci, 2009) that considers simultaneous...

We investigate the accuracy of UPP as a tool in antitrust analysis when there are cost efficiencies from a horizontal merger. We include model-based, merger-specific cost efficiencies in a tractable manner and extend the standard UPP formulation to account for these efficiencies. The efficacy of...

The unprecedented access of firms to consumer level data not only facilitates more precisely targeted individual pricing but also alters firms' strategic incentives. We show that exclusive access to a list of consumers can provide incentives for a firm to endogenously assume the price leader's...

The article reviews loyalty rebates, target rebates, exclusive dealing, and bundling, and argues that these are analogous practices that deserve similar competitive analyses and rules. In particular, in the case of all of these practices, at least some marginal units are typically sold below...

We analyze how leniency affects cartel pricing in an infinitely-repeated oligopoly model where the fine rates are linked to illegal gains and detection probabilities depend on the degree of collusion. A novel aspect of this study is that we focus on the worst possible outcome. We investigate the...