For many products, platforms enable sellers to transact with buyers. We show that the competitive conditions among sellers shape the market structure in platform industries. If product market competition is tough, sellers avoid competitors by joining different platforms. This allows platforms to...

How should firms optimally choose prices and promotional strategies and how should they position their products when consumers are "relative thinkers"? We provide answers in a model that extends the seminal contributions of Varian (1980) and Narasimhan (1988) and derive both managerial...

This paper analyses a two-sided market in which two platforms compete against each other. One side, the advertisers, exerts a negative externality on the ther side, the users. It is shown that if platforms can charge advertisers only, a higher degree of competition for users can lead to higher...

We investigate the effects of market transparency on prices in the Bertrand duopoly model for both the cases of strategic complementarities and strategic substitutes. For the former class of games conventional wisdom concerning prices is confirmed, since they decrease. The consumers are always...

When products are sold in advance, i.e. prior to consumption, consumers trade off an early, uninformed purchase at a low price against a late, informed purchase at a high price. This paper considers the effect of market structure on the prevalence of advance selling. We show that in an...

In this paper, we tackle the dilemma of pruning versus proliferation in a vertically differentiated oligopoly under the assumption that some firms collude and control both the range of variants for sale and their corresponding prices, likewise a multiproduct firm. We analyse whether pruning...

We analyze the role of consumer expectations in a Hotelling model of price competition when products exhibit network effects. Expectations can be strong (stubborn), weak (price-sensitive) or partially stubborn (a mix of weak and strong). As a rule, the price-sensitivity of demand declines when...

In a recent paper, Alipranti et al. (2014, Price vs. quantity competition in a vertically related market, Economics Letters, 124: 122-126) show that in a vertically related market Cournot competition yields higher social welfare compared to Bertrand competition if the upstream firm subsidises...

This paper investigates the strategic effect of bundling when a multi-product firm producing two complements faces competition in both markets. I consider a demand structure where both Cournot and Bertrand competition can be evaluated. Bundling is completely ineffective when firms compete in...

An integrated monopoly, where all complements forming a composite good are offered by a single firm, is typically welfare superior to a complementary monopoly. This is the "tragedy of the anticommons". We consider the possibility of competition in the market for each complement. We present a...