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Tying arrangements recently have been a major and contentious issue in many high profile antitrust cases in the US and Europe. Examples include the Microsoft case, the Visa and MasterCard case, and the proposed GE/Honeywell merger to name a few. This paper conducts a selective review of the recent developments in the analysis of tying arrangements. It also discusses relevant antitrust cases concerned with tying arrangements in light of recent theoretical advances in this area.

This paper reconsiders the political economy of protection in declining industries. I return to the Stigler-Peltzman specification of the political support function & show that this specification can be used to portray temporary protection & by assuming partially mobile capital with convex adjustment costs, realistic adjustment paths: protection is gradually reduced in response to the decline in the world price until protection is completely withdrawn. The decrease in endogenous protection is, however, not a direct consequence of the decrease in the world price as in the standard portrait of senescent industry protection. It is rather self-inflicted by the perspicacious owners of specific capital. 2 Figures, 15 References. Adapted from the source document.

"In a seminal article on the political economy of trade protection, Hillman (1982) proposed a theory of endogeneous protection in which the level of protection provided to an import-competing industry is determined as an outcome of political competition by agents in the economy. Hillman adapts the regulation model of Stigler-Peltzman to this international setting in which the government is viewed as a less benign, political support-maximizing agent. More specifically, he uses a Ricardo-Viner type specific factors model of international trade where owners of the factor specific to the import-competing sector lobby for protection whereas owners of other factors oppose it. Adopting the StiglerPeltzman assumption employed in the context of regulation, he first specifies a political support function which depends on the welfare levels of two competing groups which, in turn, depend on the level of the regulated domestic industry price. The implication of this set-up is that the industry's domestic price is invariant to import price changes because the political support-seeking policy-maker will always ensure that the domestic price is maintained at the level where the political support function is maximized. Therefore, the import tariff will be adjusted to exactly offset any exogenous changes in the world price."

AbstractWe explore the optimal disclosure policy of a certification intermediary where (i) the seller decides on entry and investment in product quality, and (ii) the buyers observe an additional public signal on quality. The optimal policy maximizes rent extraction from the seller by trading off incentives for entry and investment. We identify conditions under which full, partial or no disclosure can be optimal. The intermediary's report becomes noisier as the public signal gets more precise, but if the public signal is sufficiently precise, the intermediary resorts to full disclosure. However, the social welfare may reduce when the public signal becomes more informative.