This book provides a systematic presentation of new microeconomic theories of imperfect information. Each chapter explores a particular type of informational asymmetry and reviews major papers. Wherever possible the theories are compared with experimental evidence. An extensive bibliography is included. Part I, statics, begins with an examination of how imperfect price or quantity information on the buyer's side provides new explanations of phenomena such as price dispersion and sales or resale price maintenance. A thorough discussion of private value auctions and common value auctions follows. Subsequent chapters investigate the links between uncertainty about personal characteristics and job signaling, incomplete insurance coverage, and credit rationing by banks. Part II, dynamics, relates the dynamics of collusion, predation, and market efficiency to the transmission, pooling, and aggregation of private information. Game theoretic findings and their implications for antitrust policy are included.

This book offers a theoretical and unified explanation of how prices are determined in practice. Pricing, as observed in real life, turns out to be almost discriminatory. Four broad areas are covered: the spatial pricing of bulky products (Part I); the intertemporal pricing of storable goods, exhaustible resources, new durables, and nonstorable goods and services (Part II); two-part tariffs, commodity bundling, tie-ins, and nonlinear prices in general (Part III); and pricing of goods of different quality (Part IV). Each essay contains an introductory chapter describing the business practices that are to be rationalized and evaluated. This is the first unified treatment of a recent and growing body of literature in the 'new industrial organization' field. It fills the gap between textbook microeconomics and real-life antitrust cases. The treatment is as nontechnical and down to earth as possible to permit a wide audience for this comprehensive discussion of industrial pricing.

This book is an important collection of papers published over the past ten years in American and European journals. Part 1 explains market structure as a function of sunk costs and market size. Part 2 illustrates the central role of pricing schemes (including parallel pricing, delivered pricing and competition clauses) in sustaining equilibrium outcomes in oligopolistic markets. Parts 3 and 4 give a game-theoretic foundation to competition policy and merger control. Louis Phlips offers a comprehensive introduction to the text in which he very carefully explains the reasoning behind his choice of papers, and provides a superb synthesis of the material.

This book uses game theory to analyze anti-competitive behavior among firms and to consider its implications for competition policy. Topics include "explicit collusion," "tacit collusion," "semicollusion," and the detection of predatory pricing. The book discusses several European antitrust decisions and empirical studies in detail.

This is the first systematic textbook presentation of the new microeconomic theories based on imperfect information. Each chapter explores a particular type of informational asymmetry and reviews the main contributions, from the seminal papers of the late 1960s through the most recent developments. Wherever possible the theories covered are confronted with the available experimental evidence.