Suchergebnisse

We consider the interplay between regulatory agencies with overlapping competencies: for example, a competition authority and a sectoral regulator. This reflects the current situation in the European Union and in the US. We analyse how authorities' incentives to act are affected if they can decide independently, or must follow each others' opinions, respectively, and consider how this relationship performs in the presence of institutional biases and lobbying efforts. A higher likelihood of closing a case tends to be achieved when the authorities act independently of each other: the probability of coming to a decision is higher, and decisions are less vulnerable to lobbying. ; authorsversion ; published

Our concern is with a firm-specific industrial policy. When R&D subsidies or taxes are differentiated among firms, the question arises which firms in an industry should receive such support. We analyze a situation where firms differ in their R&D technologies in two distinct ways: They differ both in the costs of performing R&D activities and in the output obtained from such activities. We find that the optimal firm-specific industrial policy is affected differently by the two sources of firm heterogeneity. Furthermore, a change in a firm's R&D productivity has an ambiguous effect on the optimal policy towards the firm.

Abstract
Prevention has been a main issue of recent policy orientations in health care. This renews the interest on how different organizational designs and the definition of payment schemes to providers may affect the incentives to provide preventive health care.
We focus on the externality resulting from referral decisions from primary to acute care providers. This makes our analysis complementary to most works in the literature allowing to address in a more direct way the issue of preventive health care. The analysis is performed through a series of examples combining different payment schemes at the primary care center and hospital. When hospitals are reimbursed according to costs, prevention efforts are unlikely to occur. However, under a capitation payment for the primary care center and prospective budget for the hospital, prevention efforts increase when shifting from an independent to an integrated management. Also, from a normative standpoint, optimal payment schemes are simpler under joint management.

Abstract
We present a model of competition between two advertising-financed media firms when consumers dislike advertising. We apply the model to analyze competition between Internet portals and find that equilibrium prices of advertising are higher the less differentiated the portals are perceived to be. Moreover, we find that the portals' aggregate profit increases if they integrate vertically with advertisers. This is true even if there is perfect competition between advertisers for advertising space. But if the portals are close substitutes, then it is profitable for one of the portals not to combine with an advertiser, and we end up with an asymmetric equilibrium with only one vertical merger - despite aggregate profits being higher with two.

"We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is
a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the
relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based
deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis of the
deterrence effects of merger policy enforcement, and potential implications
regarding how to reduce anti-competitive merger proposals." (author's abstract)

"We show that the number of merger proposals (frequency-based deterrence) is a more appropriate indicator of underlying changes in merger policy than the relative anti-competitiveness of merger proposals (composition-based deterrence). This has strong implications for the empirical analysis of the deterrence effects of merger policy enforcement, and potential implications regarding how to reduce anti-competitive merger proposals." (author's abstract)