We address Allan Shampine's critiques of our study on the costs and benefits of payment instruments, and review the current state of the literature. We argue that a consensus seems to be emerging in which: (a) different payment instruments appear to be socially efficient at different transaction...

We provide a theoretical result on the effect of piracy on the sales of legal product using the same framework as Gil (2006). We obtain that when the illegal sector is perfectly competitive and the marginal cost of the legal firm and the quantity tax are small enough, piracy does not lead to...

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...

Using a simple model of two-sided markets, we show that, in the social optimum, platform pricing leads to an inherent cost recovery problem. This result is driven by the positive externality of participation that users on either side of the market exert on the opposite side. The contribution of...

In this short comment, I provide my views on "Market Power and Efficiency in Card Payment Systems" (published in this issue) that was presented at the Antitrust Activity in Card-Based Payment Systems: Causes and Consequences conference, and more generally on the ideas introduced by Rochet and...

In this article, we construct a model to study competing payment networks, where networks offer differentiated products in terms of benefits to consumers and merchants. We study market equilibria for a variety of market structures: duopolistic competition and cartel, symmetric and asymmetric...

This paper examines the evolution of airline business models and network structure decisions in the passenger aviation industry. The paper reviews the growth of hub-and-spoke networks as the dominant business model following deregulation in the latter part of the 20th century, followed by the...

Wireless operators often outsource the task of creating content to independent content providers in the mobile Internet market. Revenue streams of the mobile Internet market typically consist of two main sources, data traffic and content sales. It is often the case that only the revenue from...

In this paper, I model competition between legal and pirate products. In this framework, the government affects competition through police spending and taxes on the legal products. Therefore, the government can choose the optimal combination of spending and taxes that fit better its goals. I...

A payment instrument that disproportionately charges merchants (as with high interchange) can take business from others that offer the two-sided customer better deals. This competitive bias arises because merchants internalize cardholders' benefits (even without merchant competition). Use of an...