Over the period 2015-2017, the five giant technologically leading firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) acquired 175 companies, from small start-ups to billion dollar deals. By investigating this intense M&A, this paper ambitions a better understanding of the Big Five's...

Digital platforms, empowered by artificial intelligence algorithms, facilitate efficient interactions between consumers and merchants that allow the collection of profiling information which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in...

In the past 20 years, large digital platforms have made many acquisitions, mainly young and innovative startups. Few of them have been reviewed by competition authorities and little is known on their evolution after acquisition. This paper intends to fill in this gap by looking at the...

I present the following proposal: information revealed during non-cartel investigations by competition law enforcement authorities, such as evaluation of M&As or investigation of monopolization (dominance) conduct, should be directly used to investigate and prosecute cartels. Currently, in...

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...

We study the question whether a holder of standard essential patents (SEPs) should be allowed to choose the level in the value chain at which to offer a FRAND license to its SEPs. We give a pos-itive answer to this question for two reasons. First, the SEP holder and the social planner tend to...

In this paper, we study the effects of a self-regulatory effort, orchestrated by the European Commission, that aims to reduce advertising revenues for publishers of copyright infringing content. Historical data lets us follow how the third-party advertising and tracking services associated with...

We examine how different pass-through rates, from input- to final consumer prices, and different vertical contracts affect upstream market definition. Our theory model predicts that, under reasonable conditions, higher pass-through rates lead to definitions of larger upstream markets. Data...

We test for the distributional effects of regulation and entry in the mobile telecommunications sector in a highly unequal country, South Africa. Using six waves of a consumer survey of over 134,000 individuals between 2009-2014, we estimate a discrete-choice model allowing for...

Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...