The paper applies economic theories to give an overview of the emerging phenomenon of digital personal assistants (DPAs). A DPA is an intelligent automated system that interacts with the user through a dialogue in natural language, and meanwhile applying third-party services to obtain...

This article conducts a detailed analysis of the concept of economic dependence and exploitative abuse based on how their treatment in competition law and economics and their enforcement in European case law have evolved. Although the theoretical roots of these concepts lie in economic theory,...

This paper outlines the modern industrial organization theory of media markets including competition policy implications. After recapturing fundamentals of industrial organization theory in a non-technical way, the state of the art of (i) modern platform economics, (ii) the economics of the...

Both money and debt are products of credit creation of banks. Money is always circulating among traders by facilitating commodity transactions. In contrast, debt is created by borrowing and annihilated by repayment as it is matured. However, when this creation- annihilation process is mediated...

While popular opinion often pictures FDI flowing in search of lowest-wage, lowest- skilled activities in emerging markets, actual FDI to such countries increasingly addresses medium to high-skilled manufacturing sectors. Such FDI might be called "Quality FDI" that contributes to the creation of...

The economic literature on the superstar phenomenon provides empirical evidence on different types of stars, above all athletes and musicians. A new and, to our best knowledge, unexplored area of this star theory arouse with the development of social media markets. In this paper, we analyse a...

In this paper we investigate the recent fall in unemployment, and the rise in part-time work, labour market participation, inequality and welfare in Germany. Unemployment fell because the Hartz IV reform induced a large fraction of the long-term unemployed to deregister as jobseekers and appear...

We investigate within a model of cultural transmission the conditions under which increased social diversity within a population - e.g. due to the inflow of immigrants - raise the potential for conflict as opposed to harmonious social diversity. Drawing on evidence from psychological studies, we...