We study the 1956 consent decree against the Bell System to investigate whether patents held by a dominant firm are harmful for innovation and if so, whether compulsory licensing can provide an effective remedy. The consent decree settled an antitrust lawsuit that charged Bell with having...

How does antitrust enforcement against patent-based monopolies affect innovation? I address this question by empirically studying the US antitrust case against Xerox, the monopolist in the market for plain-paper copiers. In 1975, Xerox was ordered to license all its copier-technology patents in...

This report provides an overview on the economics of attention intermediaries. It addresses the following questions: What are the economics of attention intermediaries? For competition policy, how should markets be defined and market power of attention intermediaries be assessed? What theories...

We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is...

We build a model of the news market where advertisers allocate their ads between a social media platform and a news website. Our objective is to evaluate policy interventions aimed at fostering news creation by transferring revenues from social media to news websites already introduced in...

We analyze a large merger in the Dutch banking market during the financial crisis using disaggregated data. Based on a merger simulation model, we evaluate merger-induced changes in the interest rates for savings accounts. We find that the merging banks decreased interest rates by 3 to 5 percent...