I analyze standard setting organizations' decisions on licensing policy and standard's technological specification, and the ensuing implications for social welfare. I find the conditions under which a licensing rule that grants monopoly power to the licensors whose technology is adopted in the...

This paper reviews the small but growing economic literature on network neutrality. It considers a number of possible departures from network neutrality, in particular termination fees, second-degree price discrimination, and vertical foreclosure

In its Guidance Paper on Article 102 TFEU, the Commission established three conditions that in its view must normally be satisfied before a "refusal to deal" or "margin squeeze" may be considered contrary to Article 102 TFEU, mirroring those established by the European Court of Justice (the...

Areeda and Turner (1975) were the first to argue that a price below marginal costs should be considered a sign of predation. Recognizing that marginal cost data were typically unavailable, the authors concluded that a price below average variable cost should be presumed unlawful. This so-called...

In the pharmaceuticals sector there is an inherent tension between intellectual property rights and antitrust. This paper examines this tension over the past 10 years since modernisation of EU competition law. It looks at three types of problems: (i) restrictions on parallel imports; (ii) abuse...

Online advertising is what funds free online content. Since its birth in the 1990’s, it has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry. At the core of this industry lies the ability to identify and track users through various technical means, such as web cookies. Online tracking for...

We analyze the effectiveness of antitrust regulation in a repeated oligopoly model in which both fines and detection probabilities depend on the cartel price. Such fines are closer to actual guidelines than the commonly assumed fixed fines. Under a constant detection probability, we confirm the...

In an oligopoly configuration characterized by high barriers to (re-)entry, a finite horizon, perfect information about demand and costs and the presence of three identical firms, we show that two of them (the predators) can choose to charge an initial price that is so low that the third (the...