In economies with a continuum of agents of different types, pecuniary externalities are removed with market exchanges. Agents choose from among various possible prices they want to prevail in the future and buy or sell rights in these market exchanges for future trade. Each agent can choose the exchange it wants without regard to what any other agent is doing. But crucially, the right to trade in each and every exchange is priced. The fee structure has a per-unit price and quantity decomposition: a price, as determined by the exchange chosen, times the quantity of rights acquired.

In many industries, upstream manufacturers pay downstream retailers for achieving quantity or market share targets. These “vertical rebates” may mitigate downstream moral hazard by inducing greater retail effort but may also incentivize retailers to drop competing products. We study these offsetting effects empirically for a rebate paid to one retailer. Using a field experiment, we exogenously vary the outcome of retailer effort. We estimate models of consumer choice and retailer behavior to quantify the rebate’s effect on retail assortment and effort. We find that the rebate is designed to exclude a competing product and fails to maximize social surplus.