This paper surveys the formation of the US shipping cartels (conferences) and their state of development before the onset of World War I. These cartels ranged from simple price agreements to very complex and tight revenue pooling agreements. The focus of the paper is to identify the factors that...

Minimum quality standards (MQS) constitute an important regulatory tool that can be used to raise product qualities, to benefit consumers and to increase market participation. One of the main assumptions in the existing literature is that firms must comply with standards. Nevertheless, in many...

There are examples of entry in two-sided markets, where first entrants occupy a ‘central location’ and serve agents with ‘intermediate tastes,’ while later entrants are niche players. Why would the first entrant choose to become a ‘general’ platform, given that later entrants will...

Unrestricted flows of information usually improve efficiency. The recent growth of the Internet as a medium of communication and commerce, combined with the development of sophisticated software tools have paved the road for the collection and analysis of a vast amount of data about consumers....

We introduce a flexible third-degree price discrimination framework by modeling the information firms possess about consumers' locations (preferences) on the Salop circle as a partition. Higher information quality is translated into a partition refinement. In the limit, we obtain the perfect...

We study the matching patterns between heterogeneous principals and agents in a principal-agent model. The resulting equilibrium relationship between risk and incentives could be negative, positive or U-shaped. These results may provide an explanation for the absence of systematic empirical...

The advent of the Internet has revolutionized the way companies advertise, develop and distribute products. Firms can now customize their advertising messages and products to the particular characteristics and needs of customers. Customers themselves can create their own products. We investigate...

We develop an upstream-downstream model to analyze downstream firms' incentives to bundle. In our framework, the upstream firms are content providers (such as television stations) and the downstream firms are system operators (such as cable/satellite operators). We show that an a la carte...