The decade from 1953 to 1963 was one of drastic change for the egg industry in Utah. A study conducted at Utah State University shows that in 1952, slightly more than 40 percent of local egg production was s old in distant markets while in 1964, import data gathered from egg handlers in the State indicate that 20 to 25 percent of the eggs consumed in Utah were imported.

Legal rules protecting the economic competition against abusive pricing practices are traditionally part of the public branch of competition law. Sensitive drafting of the law by legislator or the prudence of law interpretation by the competition authority or the court in the specific case predetermines the companies` willingness to develop dynamically on the relevant market. Legislation of the poor quality prospectively misleading decisional practice can lead in two extreme situations; on one side unlimited freedom for the dominant company, on the other side unfounded and excessive sanctions, which distract the companies` ambitions to achieve excellence. The topic - The Protection of Economic Competition with Special Regard to Pricing - is dealt in five chapters of the thesis. The aim of the paper is to analyze substantial components in each price form of abuse, solve the relevant questions of law with regard to case study concerning both the European and the Czech context and consider where the development of this law field currently results in. The methodology is mainly based on the comparative and critical research of the decisional practice. Chapter One surveys predatory pricing. It contains passage on the price-costs test, which is the major issue also for the following chapters of the study....

Thesis advisor: Julie H. Mortimer / The unifying theme of this dissertation is the growing importance of pharmaceutical products in health care and in society more broadly. The first two chapters use structural and reduced-form models to study the effects of various policies on the choice and utilization of prescription drugs. The third chapter surveys the empirical literature on the competitive effects of a class of pricing arrangements used in the pharmaceutical and many other industries. Chapter 1. One of the criticisms leveled against direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is that it overemphasizes the use of pharmaceuticals at the expense of other forms of treatment. In “Choice of Depression Treatment: Advertising Spillovers in a Model with Complementarity,” I study how antidepressant TV ads affect demand for psychotherapy. Antidepressant advertising can increase demand for therapy if the products are complements or if advertising has spillover effects. To disentangle the different channels, I develop a discrete-choice demand model that allows for complementarity between products, advertising spillovers, and flexible unobserved preference heterogeneity. Individual-level panel data on treatment choices and price variation allow me to separately identify complementarity and correlated preferences, whereas the average price of TV advertising, used as an instrument, identifies the causal effect of antidepressant ads on demand for each product. The results indicate that even though antidepressants and psychotherapy are substitutes, drug advertising increases demand for therapy through a spillover effect. Allowing for time-invariant and time-varying unobservables that can be correlated across products critically affects the estimated degree of complementarity and advertising elasticities. Chapter 2. While prescription drugs have enabled the cost-effective treatment of a myriad of diseases, many pharmaceuticals come with potential for abuse. The growing use of opioid medications for chronic pain led to widespread misuse, addiction, and skyrocketing overdose death rates. In “Did Plain-Vanilla Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs Reduce Opioid Use? Evidence from Privately Insured Patients,” I explore whether prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) with no registration or use mandates were effective in reducing the utilization of opioid prescription drugs. Exploiting the staggered introduction of such programs between 2008 and 2010, I use difference-in-differences to estimate their causal effect on the number of prescriptions, days supply, and dosage per capita. Based on data from privately insured adults, the estimation results reveal that PDMPs successfully reduced opioid utilization, especially of high-dosage prescriptions. A battery of robustness checks suggests that the estimated effects are caused by the PDMPs and not by confounding factors such as broader trends in health care, attrition, out-of-state purchases, or other anti-opioid policies. Chapter 3. The assumption that buyers pay the same price for each unit of the good they purchase underlies many economic analyses. However, linear pricing is one of many pricing arrangements used in practice. In “Empirical Evidence on Conditional Pricing Practices: A Review,” Julie Holland Mortimer and I review the existing empirical studies on the competitive impact of conditional pricing practices (CPPs), under which the price of a product may depend on a quantity, share, bundling, or other requirement. Examples of CPPs include all-units and loyalty discounts, full-line forcing contracts, and exclusivity arrangements. A common thread unifying the empirical literature is that CPPs often have both procompetitive and anticompetitive effects and that their net effect may depend on the details of the arrangements and the characteristics of the markets in which they are used. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Newspaper advertising and retail pricing practices for turkeys were ascertained and gross retail margins established for three Utah markets, 1955 to 1966, and for 12 other selected U. S. markets, 1965 and 1966. Turkey was extensively used as an advertised special item, particularly in holiday seasons. Food retailing organizations advertised turkey at low prices and margins at Thanksgiving and Christmas when consumer demand for turkey is traditionally strong. Prior to these holidays, food retailing organizations in a market simultaneously advertised turkey at identical prices and with little product differentiation thus limiting the effectiveness of turkey as an advertised item to gain competitive advantage for a food retailer.

Abuse of the Dominant Position by Prohibited Pricing Activities Abstract This thesis analyzes selected pricing practices of dominant undertakings namely predatory pricing, margin squeeze and excessive pricing. These practices may, under certain circumstances, constitute an abuse of the dominant position. The aim of the thesis is to focus on problematic aspects of each of these practices, on explanation of various legal and economic tests used to prove that certain pricing policy constitutes an abuse of dominant position and on the description of conditions that have to be met in order to consider such practice contrary to the competition law of the Czech Republic and the European Union. The thesis is composed of four chapters. In Chapter One a brief introduction to the competition law itself and to the analyzed matter is given. Chapter Two describes basic terminology used when dealing with cases of abuse of a dominant position such as basic legal concept of the abuse itself, definition of an undertaking and a competitor according to the EU law and the Czech law respectively, delimitation of a relevant market and finally definition of a dominant position. Chapter Three is oriented on the selected pricing practices of dominant undertakings. This Chapter is subdivided into three parts each of which is dealing...