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The 4th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and WZB which takes place twice a year, in the Fall and in the Spring. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the...

The EU’s 2030 Climate and Energy Framework and Energy Security

Supplier Fixed Costs and Retail Market Monopolization

Considering a vertical structure with perfectly competitive upstream firms that deliver a homogenous good to a differentiated retail duopoly, we show that upstream fixed costs may help to monopolize the downstream market. We find that downstream prices increase in upstream firms’ fixed costs when both intra- and interbrand competition exist. Our findings contradict the common wisdom that fixed costs ...

The Welfare Impact of Parallel Imports: A Structural Approach Applied to the German Market for Oral Anti-Diabetics

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand and, based on an oligopolistic model of multiproduct firms, we then recover the marginal costs and ...

Strategic Behaviour in Energy Markets: Advances in Complementarity and Multi-Stage Equilibrium Modelling ; Dissertation

Diese Dissertation untersucht mehrere energiewirtschaftliche Fragestellungen, in denen Marktmacht eine besondere Rolle spielt; mittels spieltheoretischer Ansätze werden die strategischen Interaktionen mathematisch formuliert und anhand numerischer Methoden Gleichgewichte der Spiele identifiziert. Der Beitrag zum wissenschaftlichen Diskurs rund um den Themenbereich Marktmacht in der Energiewirtschaft ...

The Welfare Impact of Parallel Imports: A Structural Approach Applied to the German Market for Oral Anti-Diabetics

We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel dataset containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 649 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand, and on the basis of an oligopolistic model of multi-product firms, we then recover the marginal costs ...

Crop Failures and Export Tariffs

We analyse a stylized model of the world grain market characterized by a small oligopoly of traders with market power on both the supply and demand side. Crops are stochastic and exporting countries can impose export tariffs to protect domestic food prices. Our first results is that export tariffs are strategic complements and that for poor harvests equilibrium tariffs can explode (shedding some light ...

From Boom to Bust? A Critical Look at US Shale Gas Projections

US shale gas production is generally expected to continue its fast rise. However, a cautious evaluation is needed. Shale gas resource estimates are potentially overoptimistic and it is uncertain to which extent they can be produced economically. Moreover, the adverse environmental effects of ever more wells to be drilled may lead to a fall in public acceptance and a strengthening of regulation. The ...

Price Guarantees, Consumer Search, and Hassle Costs

The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of uninformed ...

Endogenous Investment Decisions in Natural Gas Equilibrium Models with Logarithmic Cost Functions

The liberalisation of the natural gas markets and the importance of natural gas as a transition fuel to a low-carbon economy have led to the development of several large-scale equilibrium models in the last decade. These models combine long-term market equilibria and investments in infrastructure while accounting for market power by certain suppliers. They are widely used to simulate market outcomes ...