Industrial organization.

• Position: Bureau News - Environmental concerns

The NBER's Program on Industrial Organization, directed by Nancy L. Rose of MIT, met at the NBER's California office on February 20 and 21. Severin Borenstein, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, and Alan Sorensen, NBER and University of California, San Diego, organized this program:

Federico Ciliberto, North Carolina State University, and Elie Tamer, Princeton University, "Market Structure and Multiple Equilibria in Airline Markets" Discussant: Kenneth Hendricks, University of Texas, Austin

Erin T. Mansur, Yale University, "Environmental Regulation in Oligopoly Markets: A Study of Electricity Restructuring" Discussant: Frank A. Wolak, NBER and Stanford University

Ali Hortacsu, NBER and University of Chicago, and Steven L. Puller, Texas A&M, "Testing Strategic Models of Firm Behavior in Restructured Electricity Markets: A Case Study of ERCOT" Discussant: Peter C. Reiss, NBER and Stanford University

Fabio Panetta and Fabiano Schivardi, Banca d'Italia, and Matthew Shum, Johns Hopkins University, "Do Mergers Improve Information? Evidence from the Loan Market" Discussant: Mark Israel, Northwestern University

David Genesove, Hebrew University, "Why Are There So Few (and Fewer and Fewer) Two-Newspaper Towns?" Discussant: Joel Waldfogel, NBER and University of Pennsylvania

Meghan Busse, University of California, Berkeley; Jorge Silva-Risso, University of California, Riverside; and Florian Zettelmeyer, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, "$1000 Cash Back: Asymmetric Information in Auto Manufacturer Promotions" Discussant: Timothy F. Bresnahan, NBER and Stanford University

Sharon M. Oster, Yale University, and Fiona M. Scott Morton, NBER and Yale University, "Behavioral Decisionmaking: An Application to the Setting of Magazine Subscription Prices" Discussant: Stefano della Vigna, University of California, Berkeley

Ulrike Malmendier, Stanford University, and Geoffrey Tate, Harvard University, "Who Makes Acquisitions? CEO Overconfidence and the Market's Reaction" Discussant: Judith A. Chevalier, NBER and Yale University

Ciliberto and Tamer provide a framework for inference in discrete games that involves multiple decisionmakers; they use it to study airline market structure in the United States. The authors make inferences about a "class of models", rather than looking for point-identifying assumptions that pin down a unique model. Their estimation strategy is directed at a class of models that obey this fundamental assumption: if a...