This essay analyzes the long-term lessons of the recent upturn and downturn in the telecommunications industry. It concludes that volatility and cyclicality will be an inherent part of the telecom sector in the future. To deal with such instabilities, companies and investors seek consolidation and cooperation. Government, too, is likely to stress stability more than before. Hence, an oligopoly ...

This paper analyzes the role played by intermediation in a decentralized market, where trade is carried out through bilateral bargaining, and where the bargaining outcomes depend on the process of search for suitable trading partners. To this purpose, ...rst a model of random matching and twosided search with heterogeneous agents is developed. The characterization of pure search equilibria is p...

We consider a model of a sector in which the same set of oligopolistic firms faces a common labour supply constraint. The wage is given in the short run, adjusting competitively in the longer run. When the costs of job creation are low relative to the degree of output market power, there exists no wage that clears the labour market in the short run, and at some wages there are two equilibria, o...

The market power of the incumbents means that average pool prices are set by the costs of entry. Reforms which raise entry costs will be proposed and should be resisted. Reforms to capacity payments may have little effect on prices, but could affect system security. The values of VOLL and LOLP appear grossly incorrect, and if changed might affect reserve margins and the allocation of investment...

We present a theory of unilateral regulatory overcompliance as a signaling device. Firms that have a competitive advantage in the use of a cleaner but more costly technology overcomply in order to signal to an imperfectly informed, benevolent government that compliance costs are low, thereby triggering tougher regulation. We identify the conditions under which such an overcompliance signaling e...

Government-sponsored auctions for production rights (e.g., license auctions, privatizations, etc.) shape the industry structure. Are there mechanisms that induce an efficient industry structure (at least when there are no positive costs to public funds)? The answer is “no” whenever firms have private information about both fixed and marginal costs. Our analysis also suggests that the second-bes...

This article presents a model to analyze consumer welfare, price, and competition in a three-way market among consumers, medical providers, and insurers. While insurers compete with each other for customers, they also act as collective bargaining agents on behalf of consumers in determining the equilibrium price of health care with providers. The entry of an additional insurer thus has contradi...

The present paper studies repeated Bertrand oligopoly with multiple markets. The markets are subject to independent, stochastic fluctuations in demands. According to the literature, the demand fluctuations generally hinder collusion, while the multimarket contact sometimes facilitates it. We show that when only partial collusion is sustainable under a single market, the per-market expected prof...

This paper investigates price competition with private information on the demand side. Two sellers each offer a different variety of a good to a buyer endowed with a private binary signal on their relative quality. The model provides an informational foundation to differentiation in Hotelling's price competition game. Equilibrium comparative statics is performed with respect to the prior belief...

In this experiment, we analyze strategic delegation in a Cournot duopoly. Owners can choose among two different contracts, which determine their managers’ salaries. One contract simply gives managers incentives to maximize firm profits, while the second contract gives an additional sales bonus. Although theory predicts the second contract to be chosen, it is only rarely chosen in the experiment...