An empirical analysis of countervailing power in business-to-business bargaining

Pricing schemes in business-to-business (B2B) relationships reflect price discrimination and bargaining over rents. Bargaining outcomes are determined by upstream market power and countervailing buyer power downstream. This paper uses an exceptional panel of B2B transactions in the UK brick market to study B2B transaction prices. The empirical analysis identifies three effects on prices: nonlinear volume and freight absorption effects; countervailing power effects arising from buyers' local commercial significance; and competition effects due to the buyers' local potential suppliers. And it shows that small buyers benefit more from competition than large buyers because they are not constrained by the suppliers' capacity

Retransmission Consent, Network Ownership, and the Programming Decisions of Cable Operators

Using a discrete choice model and a dataset consisting of the 81 most carried cable networks and the programming decisions of a sample of cable franchises, this study found that networks owned by broadcasters are more likely to be carried than are independent networks. The results also show that this advantage decreases with the popularity and the age of the network and that networks owned by cable operators exhibited an even greater likelihood of being carried.

Vertical Ownership, Program Network Carriage, and Tier Positioning in Cable Television: An Empirical Study

Vertical integration, Cable television, Program carriage, Program positioning,