The choice of language is a crucial decision for …rms competing in cultural goods and media markets with a bilingual or multilingual consumer base. To the extent that multilingual consumers have preferences over the intrinsic characteristics (content) as well as over the language of the...

We study competition in experimental markets in which two incumbents face entry by three other firms. Our treatments vary with respect to three factors: sequential vs. block or simultaneous entry, the cost functions of entrants and the amount of time during which incumbents are protected from...

European and the US mobile communication services markets have developed in rather different ways. There are striking differences in termination regulation and retail pricing models and one may wonder why this occurred and whether either of the markets outperforms the other in terms of...

Many economists and policy analysts seem to believe that loyaltyrewarding pricing schemes, like frequent flyer programs, tend to reinforce firm's market power and hence are detrimental to consumer welfare. The existing academic literature has supported this view to some extent. In contrast, we...

Bertrand competition under decreasing returns involves a wide interval of pure strategy equilibrium prices. We first present results of experiments in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. Less collusion with more firms leads to lower average prices....

We develop a model of the interacting markets for online content and offline products. We portray content providers and the search engine as competing platforms that intermediate in the product market (a horizontal relation), while also vertically related in the content market. Explicitly...

We present a dynamic model where the accumulation of patents generates an increasing number of claims on sequential innovation. We compare innovation activity under three regimes patents,no-patents,andpatentpoolsand find that none of them can reach the first best. We find that the first best...

Within a simple model of non-localized, Hotelling-type competition among arbitrary numbers of media outlets we characterize quality and content of media under different ownership structures. Assuming advertising-sponsored, profit-maximizing outlets, we show that (i) topics sensitive to...

The goal of this paper is to reexamine the optimal design and efficiency of loyalty rewards in markets for final consumption goods. While the literature has emphasized the role of loyalty rewards as endogenous switching costs (which distort the efficient allocation of consumers), in this paper l...

The paper offers an overview of the literature on bundling in the telecommunications sector and its application in the Spanish market. We argue that the use of bundling in the provision of services is associated to technological reasons. Therefore, there appears no need to regulate bundling...