We consider the successful early emergence of cooperative creameries in Denmark in the late nineteenth century within the framework of the “new institutional economics” presented by Oliver Williamson. Previous work focused on the social cohesion of the Danes, but we demonstrate that this was...

This paper considers the effect of private information on the incentive to form a cartel that acts both as a strategy-coordination device and as an information-sharing device. Focusing on involuntary information transmission from the cartel to any outside firms, it is shown that private...

The paper analyses the effect of uncertainty in a two stage duopoly model in which firms first choose capacity, then prices. We show that no pure strategy Nash equilibrium exists regardless of whether the realization of demand is known to firms before or after they choose their prices. On the...

In a duopoly model with sequential price setting we show that as a result of private information prices are either sticky in the sense that they are not adjusted to available information on market conditions, or prices are adjusted but become upward biased. Hence asymmetric information causes...

We investigate whether improved transparency about prices may increase the countervailing power exercised by buyers of an intermediate good. In a model with an informed manufacturer that sells to both informed and uninformed firms, we show that full transparency cannot be part of equilibrium due...

In 1996, the British Government was accused of a protectionist "buy British" campaign when it awarded a contract for army ambulances to Land Rover. We present a model where the procurement decision of the government affects the perception of consumers in the rest of the world about the quality...

This paper considers the incentives for risk-averse firms to share their private information. They show that the introduction of risk aversion in some cases reverses the result in the literature that no such incentives exist. Further, they show that the output level of risk-averse Cournot...