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Increasingly, algorithms are supplanting human decision-makers in pricing goods and services. To analyze the possible consequences, we study experimentally the behavior of algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (Q-learning) in a workhorse oligopoly model of repeated price competition. We find that the algorithms consistently learn to charge supracompetitive prices, without communicating with one another. The high prices are sustained by collusive strategies with a finite phase of punishment followed by a gradual return to cooperation. This finding is robust to asymmetries in cost or demand, changes in the number of players, and various forms of uncertainty.

Empirical work has drawn attention to the high degree of productivity differences within industries and their role in resource allocation. This paper examines the allocational efficiency of suchmarkets. Productivity differences introduce two new margins of potential inefficiency: selection of the right distribution of firms and allocation of the right quantities across firms. We show that these considerations affect welfare and policy analysis, and market power across firms leads to distortions in resource allocation. Demand-side elasticities determine how resources are misallocated and when increased competition from market expansion provides welfare gains.

We study production in advance in a setting where firms first source inventories that remain unobservable to rivals, and then simultaneously set prices. In the unique equilibrium, each firm occasionally holds a sale relative to its reference price, resulting in firms sometimes being left with unsold inventory. In the limit as inventory costs become fully recoverable, the equilibrium converges to an equilibrium of the game where firms only choose prices and produce to order—the associated Bertrand game (examples of which include fully asymmetric clearinghouse models). Thus, away from that limit, our work generalizes Bertrand-type equilibria to production in advance, and challenges the commonly held view associating production in advance with Cournot outcomes. The analysis involves, as an intermediate step, mapping the price-inventory game into an asymmetric all-pay contest with outside options and non-monotonic winning and losing functions. We apply our framework to public policy towards information sharing, mergers, cartels, and taxation.

Competitive implications of cross-holdings have been extensively analyzed in the literature. Incentives for engaging cross-holdings and welfare effects were however rarely studied. Although a similar logic as with the merger paradox holds for Cournot oligopolies with homogeneous products and symmetric technologies, we show that there are profit incentives for firms to engage cross-holdings with asymmetric technologies. Furthermore, we show that social welfare could be enhanced with cross-holdings even though the market becomes more concentrated. We also discuss the robustness of both the submodularity of the Cournot model with respect to the presence of cross-holdings and our results with respect to product differentiation.

This article considers the recent literature on firm markups in light of both new and classic work in the field of industrial organization. We detail the shortcomings of papers that rely on discredited approaches from the \"structure-conduct-performance\" literature. In contrast, papers based on production function estimation have made useful progress in measuring broad trends in markups. However, industries are so heterogeneous that careful industry-specific studies are also required, and sorely needed. Examples of such studies illustrate differing explanations for rising markups, including endogenous increases in fixed costs associated with lower marginal costs. In some industries there is evidence of price increases driven by mergers. To fully understand markups, we must eventually recover the key economic primitives of demand, marginal cost, and fixed and sunk costs. We end by discussing the various aspects of antitrust enforcement that may be of increasing importance regardless of the cause of increased markups.

This article assesses several aspects of recent macroeconomic market power research. These include the ways market power is defined and measured; the use of accounting data to estimate markups; the quantitative implications of theoretical connections among markups, prices, costs, scale elasticities, and profits; and conflicting evidence on whether greater market power has led to lower investment rates and a lower labor share of income. Throughout this discussion, I characterize the congruencies and incongruencies between macro evidence and micro views of market power and, when they do not perfectly overlap, explain the open questions that need to be answered to make the connection complete.

This paper considers cost-reducing R&D investment with spillovers in a Cournot oligopoly with overlapping ownership. We show that overlapping ownership leads to internalization of rivals’ profits by firms and find that, for demand not too convex, increases in overlapping ownership increase (decrease) R&D and output for high (low) enough spillovers while they increase R&D but decrease output for intermediate levels of spillovers. There is scope for overlapping ownership to improve welfare and consumer surplus, provided that spillovers are sufficiently large. The results obtained are robust when R&D has commitment value and in a Bertrand oligopoly model with product differentiation.

A “Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains” has become a workhorse bargaining model in applied analyses of bilateral oligopoly. This paper proposes a noncooperative foundation for “Nash-in-Nash” bargaining that extends Rubinstein’s alternating offers model to multiple upstream and downstream firms. We provide conditions on firms’ marginal contributions under which there exists, for sufficiently short time between offers, an equilibrium with agreement among all firms at prices arbitrarily close to Nash-in-Nash prices, that is, each pair’s Nash bargaining solution given agreement by all other pairs. Conditioning on equilibria without delayed agreement, limiting prices are unique. Unconditionally, they are unique under stronger assumptions.

A number of recent papers have argued that US firms exert increasing market power, as measured by their markups of price over marginal cost. I review three of the main approaches to estimating economy-wide markups and show that all are based on the hypothesis of firm cost minimization. Yet different assumptions and methods of implementation lead to quite different conclusions regarding the levels and trends of markups. I survey the literature critically and argue that some of the startling findings of steeply rising markups are difficult to reconcile with other evidence and with aggregate data. Existing methods cannot determine whether markups have been stable or whether they have risen modestly over the past several decades. Even relatively small increases in markups are consistent with significant changes in aggregate outcomes, such as the observed decline in labor's share of national income.

Customers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their “best-fit” product but buy it for a lower price at a competing online retailer. This free-riding behavior by customers is referred to as “showrooming,” and we show that this is detrimental to the profits of the brick-and-mortar stores. We first analyze price matching as a short-term strategy to counter showrooming. Price matching allows customers to purchase a product from the store for less than the store’s posted price, so one would expect the price matching strategy to be less effective as the fraction of customers who seek the matching increases. However, our results show that with an increase in the fraction of customers who seek price matching, the store’s profits initially decrease and then increase. While price matching could be used even when customers do not exhibit showrooming behavior, we find that it is more effective when customers do showrooming. We then study exclusivity of product assortments as a long-term strategy to counter showrooming. This strategy can be implemented in two different ways: (1) by arranging for exclusivity of known brands (e.g., Macy’s has such an arrangement with Tommy Hilfiger) or (2) through the creation of store brands at the brick-and-mortar store (T. J. Maxx sells a large number of store brands). Our analysis suggests that implementing exclusivity through store brands is better than exclusivity through known brands when the product category has few digital attributes. However, when customers do not showroom, the known-brand strategy dominates the store-brand strategy. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2764 . This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.