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The case recounts the development of the French national soccer team between 2004 - when Raymond Domenech became head coach for the French national team - and the devastating performances on and off the field by Team France during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. After a brief overview of French soccer history, the case introduces Raymond Domenech and provides information about his career up to 2004. It presents his unique character and the soccer philosophy that made him such a promising new head coach for the French soccer team. The case continues by describing the developments over the coming years. Its main focus is Domenech but the case also looks at the soccer players - specifically their roles and behaviors vis-à-vis Domenech - the French Football Federation (FFF) as the organization that gave Domenech the job of head coach, as well as developments in the public's perception of Domenech and his work. The narrative culminates in a description of the events on June 20, 2010, when - as an act of solidarity with a player who was dismissed from the team and the tournament - the French soccer team, in front of the television cameras, refused to follow Domenech and boycotted the public training that was announced for that day. The case ends by describing the reactions of fans, media, politicians, and French officials to the events, the measures that the FFF took following the scandal, and the interpretations different observers formulated in the weeks that followed.

On September 15 and 16, 2008, the British artist Damien Hirst broke all rules of the art market. He bypassed conventional distribution channels - dealers and gallery owners - by directly partnering with Sotheby's auction house - and with their help successfully sold more than 200 pieces of his works. Sotheby's auctioned art works which were less than two years old, which was another break from tradition. Hirst earned more than £110 million from the auction - in the midst of a global economic crisis and on the same day that the Lehman Brothers Investment house collapsed. The case study provides an overview of Hirst's career as an artist and the circumstances that supported his success. The case study enables students to develop a good understanding of the elements of a strategic innovation, and how an individual (or organization) can shake up an established industry merely by framing and answering the fundamental strategic questions "Who is the customer," "What do I offer this customer," and "How do I create value for the customer - and ultimately myself" differently. The case provides detailed information on the structure and size of the global art industry, a market that was estimated by The Economist to account from some $50 billion in sales in 2008, down from $65 billion at its peak in 2007.

This paper analyzes the strategic use of bilateral supply contracts in sequential negotiations between one manufacturer and two differentiated retailers. Allowing for general contracts and retail bargaining power, I show that the first contracting parties have incentives to manipulate their contract to shift rent from the second contracting retailer and these incentives distort the industry profit away from the fully integrated monopoly outcome. To avoid such distortion, the first contracting parties may prefer to sign a contract which has no commitment power and can be renegotiated from scratch should the manufacturer fail in its subsequent negotiation with the second retailer. Renegotiation from scratch induces the first contracting parties to implement the monopoly prices and might enable them to capture the maximized industry profit. A slotting fee, an up-front fee paid by the manufacturer to the first retailer, and a menu of tariff-quantity pairs are sufficient contracts to implement the monopoly outcome. These results do not depend on the type of retail competition, the level of differentiation between the retailers, the order of sequential negotiations, the level of asymmetry between the retailers in terms of their bargaining power vis-à-vis the manufacturer or their profitability in exclusive dealing.

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of buyer mergers, which are mergers between downstream firms from different markets. We focus on the interaction between the merger's effects on downstream efficiency and on buyer power in a setup where one manufacturer with a non-linear cost function sells to two locally competitive retail markets. We show that size discounts for the merged entity has no impact on consumer prices or on smaller retailers, unless the merger affects the downstream efficiency of the merging parties. When the upstream cost function is convex, we find that there are "waterbed effects," that is, each small retailer pays a higher average tariff if a buyer merger improves downstream efficiency. We obtain the opposite results, "anti-waterbed effects," if the merger is inefficient. When the cost function is concave, there are only anti-waterbed effects. In each retail market, the merger decreases the final price if and only if it improves the efficiency of the merging parties, regardless of its impact on the average tariff of small retailers.

 

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