New Research Centre Hosts International Conference on Buyer Power and Vertical Contracting

The newly established Nanjing University Centre for Modern Economic Research hosted its first international conference on June 8, 2011.   The conference, focused on the topic of buyer power and vertical contracting, was attended by over 50 scholars and students from China, Canada, France, and United States.  Presenters at the conference included two world-renowned researchers of vertical restraints: Patrick Rey and Ralph Winter, and two international experts on buyer power: Jeanine Miklos-Thal and David Mills.  They also included two academics from Chinese universities who have done extensive research on this topic: Qi Shi and Hao Wang. The conference program was organized by Zhiqi Chen, who himself has made influential contributions to the research on buyer power. 

The following is the list of presenters with web links to their papers:

·  Jeanine Miklos-Thal (University of Rochester) “Buyer Power and Interlocking Vertical Relations”

·David Mills (University of Virginia) “Countervailing Power and Chain Stores”

·Patrick Rey (Toulouse School of Economics) “Vertical Integration, Innovation and Foreclosure”

· Qi Shi (Nanjing University of Finance and Economics) “Vertical Restraints and Regulatory Failure in China's Retail Industry”

· Hao Wang (Peking University) “On the Vertical Structure of a Competitive Electricity Market”

·Ralph Winter (University of British Columbia) “Exclusionary Contracts”