The paper discusses the practical possibilities of achieving increased downstream processing and the policies that are commonly used for this purpose. It reviews the reasons why forward vertical integration is not always an optimal choice for extractive industry companies. It finds little...

Internet presumably reduces search cost driving price to the competitive level. Evidence from empirical research quantifying dispersion in the electronic based markets has yield mixed results. More recent research has documented near zero dispersion in the electronic markets using transaction...

The setting of user prices for enterprises with large fixed costs and marginal costs below average costs - "natural monopolies" - raises important policy questions regarding both efficiency and equity. It has become well accepted among economists that, in a variety of settings, welfare may be...

We propose a model of discrimination in the market for mortgages. The model explains accepted loan applications and determines loan sizes and interest rates simultaneously. A competitive, and a discriminating monopoly version of the model are proposed. Offered interest rates and loan sizes are a...

We provide a simple model to investigate decisions on vertical integration/separation. The key feature of this model is that more than one input is required for the final products of the local downstream monopolists. Depending on their cost structure, downstream firms' decisions on vertical...