The first theme of this paper is that direct (product) competition acts as a tournament between retailers when informational problems (or transaction costs) prevent the manufacturer from using contracts based on their relative performances. Anti-competitive restraints such as exclusive territories and resale price maintenance (which, we show, are not necessarily good substitutes) may or may not...

-The design of wholesale electricity markets through deregulation has focused almost exclusively on the development of competitive supply (generation). The demand side of the market has been virtually ignored. Mostly, this is due to the assumption that electricity demand is almost completely inelastic. As a result, deregulated wholesale markets universally fail to pass price signals down to the...

Regardless of the form of restructuring, deregulated electricity industries share one common feature: the absence of any significant, rapid demand-side response to the wholesale (or, spot market) price. For a variety of reasons, electricity industries continue to charge most consumers an average cost based on regulated retail tariff from the era of vertical integration, even as the retailers th...

The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze whether the wholesale price of apples sold in the Korean action-based wholesale market is statistically significantly different at the aggregate and disaggregate levels, or not. It means that the researchers in this study empirically analyzed to identify day-of-the-week effects in Korean wholesale price of apples. The results of this study sho...

We consider a supply chain in which a producer supplies a fresh product, through a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, to a distant market where a distributor purchases and sells it to end customers. The product is perishable, both the quantity and quality of which may deteriorate during the process of transportation. The market demand is random, sensitive to the selling price as well as the ...

The scope of a wholesale market may, in addition to demandand supply-side substitution at the wholesale level, also be determined by substitution patterns at the retail level. Considering wholesale broadband access markets, it is argued that each of these forces can be strong enough to render a 5-10% price increase by a hypothetical monopolist at the wholesale level unprofitable and thus may le...

I present a vertical differentiation model to assess the quality-wise strategy of an incumbent telecommunications operator under open access regimes. I show that it is always profitable for an incumbent subject to wholesale regulation to degrade wholesale quality in a non-recoverable fashion. The findings are robust to the number of competitors and the price cap level, unlike those predicted by...