Three Essays in Industrial Organization

This thesis contains three theoretical contributions in the field of industrial organization. The first chapter is concerned with the merger review process, and in particular with the role played by a professional advisor, who is hired by the merging parties to provide evidence about the efficiencies of the merger. It is shown that consumers are not necessarily better off when the advisor's contract is disclosed to the Antitrust Authority, due to a negative effect which hinges on a free-riding problem between advisor and authority in the information acquisition game, and is more relevant in highly competitive industries. The second chapter deals with the welfare effects of platform parity agreements, namely contractual provisions according to which a seller cannot charge different prices for the same product distributed through different platforms. The main result is that, differently from similar clauses examined in the available literature, in industries with a more complex vertical structure these provisions are likely to be pro-competitive even in the absence of efficiencies. Finally, a model of repeated adverse selection with spot contracts and persistent agents' type is considered in the third chapter, with the aim of investigating the impact of competition among managerial firms on the ratchet effect. Specifically, it is shown that, in a certain region of the parameters, it arises a new kind of semi-separating equilibrium, in which principals, as well as agents, randomize, the industry output is decreasing over time, and principals benefit from facing a more severe adverse selection problem.