In a comment to my paper "The Economics of IPR Protection Policies," Martínez-Sánchez (2007) shows that in my model under certain conditions the presence of piracy increases the quantity produced by the legal monopolist firm. In this note, I show how the algebra used in Martínez-Sánchez...

Recently, investments in new generation networks in Germany have been curtailed, since potential investors required this new network be unregulated. To develop a regulator's strategy that allows investments to occur but prevents monopolistic prices, we model an investor's decision problem under...

This paper provides a first pass at comparing two polar strategies for market intermediation: "merchant" mode - buying from sellers and reselling to buyers - and "two-sided platform" mode - enabling affiliated sellers to sell directly to affiliated buyers. The merchant mode is more profitable...

This paper addresses the investment impact of network sharing mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Such investments involve sunk costs and so are irreversible. Regulators allow entrants to utilize such facilities at prices reflecting the cost of building a new, efficient, large-scale...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow users to share networked resources, notably bandwidth and content, from the edges of the network. These services have been popularized because of file sharing - particularly the sharing of unlicensed copyrighted files. However, content owners are increasingly...

Over the past decade, the distribution/growth of information technology (IT) has transformed the organization of economic activities. IT has enhanced economic agents' capabilities to collect and process information, to coordinate and manage transactions. Although IT threatens the activities of...

This paper develops a model of oligopolistic price competition to analyze the impact of online intermediaries such as Autobytel.com on the price setting process in the automobile market. The roles of dealer search costs, the fraction of buyers using the intermediary, the value of the item being...

Developing a simple model of the content and access industries in the digital era, we show that, given the positive consumption externality from entertainment content (music, video) on access networks and playing devices (fixed broadband, 3G mobile, digital players, etc.), both content and...

We review the different market monitoring and market-power mitigation policies that arise in world electricity markets. Regulators for electricity markets apparently respond to differences in underlying market structure and design features when choosing between ex-ante (that is, rule-based)...