In developing countries with sparse retail banking branches, mobile telecom net- works have emerged as major providers of financial services bypassing traditional banks. Using individual-level mobile money transaction data in Tanzania, we find that the vast majority of these transactions can be...

This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of "dominant firms'', whose firm states are always monitored by...

This paper develops a new way to estimate cost synergies from mergers without using actual data on cost. The estimator uses a structural model in which companies play a dynamic game with endogenous mergers and product repositioning decisions. Such a formulation has several benefits over the...

We study users' response to sponsored-search advertising using data from Microsoft's Live AdCenter distributed in the "Beyond Search" initiative. We estimate a structural model of utility maximizing users, which quantifies "user experience" based on their "revealed preferences," and predicts...

This paper studies mergers in two-sided markets by estimating a structural supply and demand model and performing counterfactual experiments. The analysis is performed on data for a merger wave in U.S. radio that occurred between 1996 and 2006. The paper makes two main contributions. First, I...

This paper examines the justifications, history, and practice ofregulation in the US telecommunications sector. We examine the impact oftechnological and regulatory change on market structure and businessstrategy. Among others, we discuss the emergence and decline of thetelecom bubble, the...

This paper evaluates the incentive of firms to vertically integrate in asimple 2X2 Bertrand model of two substitutes that are each comprised oftwo complementary components. It confirms that all prices fall as aresult of a vertical merger. Further, we find that, when the compositegoods are poor...

The vast majority of U.S. residential consumers face a monopoly orduopoly in broadband Internet access. Until now, the Internet has beencharacterized by a regime of 'net neutrality,' which means there hasbeen no discrimination between the price of transmitting packets basedon the identity of...