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Essays On Firms And Human Behavior, Nicolas Aguelakakis

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies three different topics related to the economic science. In the first chapter, it is shown that collaborations between firms can have more harmful consequences on prices than a consolidation between them. We analyze a symmetric joint venture in which firms facing external competition collaborate in input production. Under standard regularity conditions, the collaboration leads to higher profits than a horizontal merger, whereas the effect on prices and quantities depends on the form of downstream competition. When firms compete in prices, downstream prices for all firms are higher following a symmetric joint venture than following a merger. The …