We develop a duopoly model with advertising supported platforms and analyze incentives of a superior firm to license its advanced technologies to an inferior rival. We highlight the role of two technologies characteristic for media platforms: The technology to produce content and to place...

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for...

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry - the videogame market - which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis...

This paper empirically evaluates the price effects of the merger of two major book retail chains in the UK: Waterstone's and Ottakar's. We employ differences-in-differences techniques and use a rich dataset containing monthly scanner data information on a sample of 200 books sold in 60 stores in...

In this paper, we highlight new conditions under which R&D agreements may have anti-competitive effects. We focus on cases where two firms compete with each other and with a competitive fringe. R&D activities need a specific input available to all firms on a common market, the price of which...

This paper investigates the impact of four key economic variables on an expert firm's incentive to defraud its customers in a credence goods market: the level of competition, the expert firm's financial situation, its competence, and its reputational concerns. We use and complement the dataset...

Since 2009, German nursing homes have been evaluated regularly with quality report cards published online. We argue that most of the information in the report cards does not reliably measure quality of care, but a subset of seven measures does. Using a sample of more than 3,000 nursing homes...

A wide range of media provide information on many products based on reviews or expert opinions. A natural question is, whether these reviews and expert opinions have any effect on sales. A small but growing literature in economics and marketing science deals with this issue, by testing the...

We analyze how consumer myopia influences investment incentives into a technology that enables firms to track consumers' purchases and make targeted offers based on their preferences. In a two-period Hotelling setup firms may invest in customer-tracking technology. If a firm acquires the...

We investigate how firms' incentives to acquire customer data for targeted offers depend on its quality. A two-dimensional Hotelling model is proposed where consumers are heterogeneous both with respect to their locations and transportation cost parameters (flexibility). Firms have perfect data...