We examine how universal service provisions and price restrictions across markets impact strategic entry and pricing. We develop a simple multi-market model with an oligopolistic (profitable) urban market and entry auctions for (unprofitable) rural service. Cross-market price restrictions induce a firm operating in both markets to become a ‘softer’ competitor, thus placing the firm at a strateg...

Why have insurance markets for many important risks failed to develop? Economic theory suggests this is most likely due to asymmetric information problems, but their presence is hard to identify empirically. In this paper I provide empirical estimates of information asymmetries in the insurance for crops, a market that has failed to develop for the most important types of natural hazards to cro...

With the growth of electronic markets, designing double auction mechanisms that are applicable to emerging market structures has become an important research topic. In this paper, we investigate two truthful double auction design approaches, the Trade Reduction Approach and the Multi-Stage Design Approach, and compare their resulting mechanisms in various exchange environments. We find that com...