Payment card associations offer both debit and credit cards and, until recently, engaged in a tie-in on the merchant side through the so-called honour-all-cards (HAC) rule. The HAC rule came under attack on the grounds that the credit and debit card markets are separate markets and that the...

Content providers rely on advertisers to pay for content. TiVo, remote controls, and pop-up ad blockers are examples of ad-avoidance technologies that allow consumers to view content without ads, and thereby siphon off the content without paying the ‘price.’ We examine the content...

Though new media has become a popular source of information, it is less clear whether or not they have a real impact on economic activity. In authoritarian regimes, where the traditional media are not free, this impact might be especially pronounced. We study consequences of blog postings of a...

We consider a network that intermediates traffic between free content providers and consumers. While consumers do not know the traffic cost when deciding on consumption, a content provider knows his cost but may not control the consumption. We study how pricing consumers' and content providers'...

The objective of the paper is to elaborate a simulation model to analyse inter and intra-modal competition in the transport industry, based on game theory models. In our setting, consumers choose a transport mode and an operator to travel on a given city-pair; operators strategically decide on...

Technological change is transforming creative media industries. Digitisation lowers recording, storage, reproduction and distribution costs, while computer-based editing facilitates higher quality and special effects. With electronic distribution a vast range of content can be made available to...

Producers of cultural goods and media products can only make their specific contents available to their audiences and readerships through a particular language. The choice of language is a trivial decision if consumers are monolingual. However, the fraction of bilingual consumers is high in some...

This Paper provides an empirical examination of third-degree price discrimination in the Swedish newspaper industry. The results show that price discrimination is more prevalent in competitive markets and among newspapers with low market shares. This supports predictions from recent theoretical...

Reducing fixed cost duplication - a common justification for concentrated market structure - motivated the US government to relax the number of radio stations a firm could operate in any local market. After deregulation the number of firms per market decreased. The implied cost saving depends on...

Two important welfare implications of network effects are that (1) market forces often result in suboptimal standardization, that is, left alone the market may fail to achieve standardization when it is socially desirable and (2) even if the market settles on a standard, the chosen standard may...