We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to "seed'' the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. The payoffs to the firms are the eventual number of adoptions of their product through a competitive...

This paper explores the empirical effects of competition on technical efficiency in the context of electricity industry restructuring. Restructuring programs adopted by many U.S. states made utilities residual claimants to cost savings and increased their exposure to competitive markets. We...

In 2003, the UK `liberalised' its telephone directory enquiries service with the aim of introducing competition so as to improve quality and lower costs. Unfortunately the results did not match expectations. Proliferation of numbers led to consumer confusion and high price firms with no...

Europe is liberalising electricity in accordance with the European Commission’s Electricity Directives. Different countries have responded differently, notably in the extent of restructuring, treatment of mergers, market power, and vertical unbundling. While Britain and Norway have achieved...

The European Commission proposed to reform the Electricity and Gas Directives to improve access to transmission, increase cross-border capacity, and fully open the electricity and gas markets. The California electricity crisis has weakened support for liberalisation, removed the commitment to...

The rapid growth of online search and its centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise many questions for economists to answer: Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What implications does this concentration have for consumers, search engines,...