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This article investigates how firms compete when they have the ability to set a personalized price to those consumers they can profile and a uniform price to those consumers they cannot profile; how this affects the incentives to supply data analytics to firms; and what, if any, policy recommendations can be provided. Two duopolists compete on price in the market for a homogeneous product. They can "profile" consumers, that is, identify their valuations with some probability. If both firms can profile consumers but with different abilities, then they achieve positive expected profits at equilibrium. This provides a rationale for firms to (partially and unequally) share data about consumers or for data brokers to sell different customer analytics to competing firms. Consumers prefer that both firms profile exactly the same set of consumers or that only one firm profiles consumers as this entails marginal cost pricing (so does a policy requiring list prices to be public). Otherwise, more protective privacy regulations have ambiguous effects on consumer surplus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the WTO Antidumping Agreement (ADA) non-disclosure clause, the investigating AD authority cannot disclose the confidential information it obtains. This paper analyzes how non-disclosure of confidential information leads the government to use the magnitude of the AD duty to signal this information, in casu the costs of the firm under investigation, to the domestic industry. We obtain two main results. First the AD authority sets lower tariffs compared to the full disclosure scenario because it has an incentive to signal that the foreign firm is relatively inefficient. Second, adhering to the non-disclosure clause leads to lower domestic welfare relative to the full disclosure scenario. On the other hand, prices are lower and global welfare is higher under the non-disclosure clause, thus providing an economic rationale for the WTO’s ADA non-disclosure clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solution concepts in social environments use either a direct or indirect dominance relationship, depending on whether it is assumed that agents are myopic or farsighted. Direct dominance implies indirect dominance, but not the reverse. Hence, the predicted outcomes when assuming myopic (direct) or farsighted (indirect) agents could be very different. In this paper, we characterize dominance invariant one-to-one matching problems when preferences are strict. That is, we obtain the conditions on preference profiles such that indirect dominance implies direct dominance in these problems and give them an intuitive interpretation. Whenever some of the conditions are not satisfied, it is important to understand whether the agents are myopic or farsighted in order to use the appropriate stability concept. Furthermore, we characterize dominance invariant one-to-one matching problems having a non-empty core. Finally, we show that, if the core of a dominance invariant one-to-one matching problem is not empty, it contains a unique matching, the dominance invariant stable matching, in which all agents who mutually top rank each other are matched to one another and all other agents remain unmatched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a setting of R& D competition, we study how collaboration affects strategic decisions during a patent contest, and how the latter influences the collaboration network structures the firms can form. We use an all pay auction approach to endogenize both network formation and R& D intensities, and to take heterogeneous and private valuations for patents into account. We find that the complete network is not always the only pairwise stable one. The other stable networks have the realistic property that some firms drop out of the contest. Thus, 'weak' cooperation can serve as a barrier to entry on the market for innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When selling their products domestically or internationally, firms rely on more than just price as a strategic variable. They also rely on non-price instruments such as advertising and/or R&D investments. Any trade policy that affects or limits the use of one variable will likely have strategic consequences for the use of all the others. Using a Hotelling model with vertical differentiation we focus on how trade policy barriers alter price and non-price competition on the goods market. The main results are as follows: first, no matter whether the trade restriction (tariff) is placed on the non-price instrument or on the good itself, the foreign (domestic) firm prefers to increase (decrease) its use of its pricing tool and give up some of (increase) its use of the non-price instrument. Second, in the presence of a non-price instrument, tariffs do not always lead both firms to increase their price: it can lead the foreign firm to decrease its (final) price. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]