Despite the central role of payments in theoretical and policy oriented economics, there is surprisingly little known about the costs of different payment instruments. We estimate social and private costs of cash, debit and credit card payments in Sweden in 2002. The combined social cost of...

According to the essential-facilities doctrine, competition law requires an infrastructural monopoly to provide access. Under the “Bronner criterion”, proposed by the EC Court, the doctrine is only applicable when a symmetric infrastructural duopoly is non-viable. This paper uses a simple...

Two-sided network effects in card payment systems are analysed under different market structures, e.g., competition, one-sided monopoly, bilateral monopoly and duopoly; with and without an interchange fee; for the so-called Baxter case of non-strategic merchants. A partial ranking of market...

According to the essential facilities doctrine, competition law requires an infrastructural monopoly to provide access. Under the ”Bronner criterion”, proposed by the EC Court, the doctrine is only applicable when an infrastructural duopoly is non-viable. This paper uses a simple model to...

The purpose of this report is to investigate how well competition in the TV-industry works, primarily focusing on distribution. For this purpose we suggest a framework of analysis and, at the same time, we apply this framework to the Swedish market. Even if our focus will be distribution...

This paper analyses how market shares for brand name drugs are affected by generic competition. The analysis is based on micro data for twelve original drugs, wich are all subject to generic competition. For five of these drugs, we find that the price of the original relative to the average...

The effects of price and market size variables on the investment propensities in the pulp and paper industry are analyzed. A panel of 15 European countries for the time period 1984 - 1997 is used in the regression analysis. We find that the wages, the $US/ECU$ exchange rate, the price of paper...

The EU procurement directives stipulate that public contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder or to the bidder with the economically most advantageous offer; the latter requiring that a scoring rule must be specified. We provide a simple theoretical framework for tender evaluation and discuss...

Non-contractible quality dimensions are at risk of degradation when the provision of public services is privatized. However, privatization may increase quality by fostering performance-improving innovation, particularly if combined with increased competition. We assemble a large data set on...