Market manipulation is a poorly understood phenomenon, due in part to legal standards that categorize manipulative behavior as either an act of outright fraud or as the nebulous use of market power to produce an artificial price. In this paper, we consider a third type of behavior that can...

The marginal cost of a good is not usually a relevant factor when crafting intellectual property policy. Marginal costs estimates are based on models of static efficiency, not dynamic efficiency, which is more relevant to policymakers.Profit margins on goods must be high enough to both support...

This paper analyses the unit cost effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) using linear, quadratic, and translog cost functions. In addition to a basic unit cost model we specify separate models for distress, profit, relative size, and cost difference, among the merging firms. We use a sample...

Using the overcharge estimates for 333 cartel episodes, we evaluate the impact of cartel characteristics and changes in the market and legal environment on the magnitude of overcharges imposed by private cartels in the US and other geographic markets as early as the 18th century. The median...

The aim of this paper is twofold: (a) to review briefly the main policy implications of Kirzner's work (and to show that Kirzner has always been careful to draw policy implications from his analysis) and (b) to contrast these with the approach that is generally used in public policy. This way, I...

This paper presents a model in which a monopoly platform not only operates a marketplace intermediating direct transactions between consumers and third-party sellers, but also sells its first-party products at the marketplace, which is designated herein as platform encroachment. When...

We study a signal-jamming model of product review manipulation in which rational consumers consult product reviews and price to better estimate a product's quality, and a firm, whose quality is either high or low, chooses its price and how much bias to insert into product reviews. We show that...

This paper studies differential pricing by an upstream monopolist whose cost to supply the intermediate good differs across buyers in the downstream. It is shown that, different from third degree price discrimination based on the downstream firms' cost of transforming the intermediate good into...