This paper considers recent proposals for restricting keyword advertising using competitor brand names. Keyword advertising is similar to many other widely used and valuable methods of marketing to the customers of rivals that increase competition and facilitate entry. Queries for products or...

The two-sided analysis of platform businesses isn’t pro-defendant or pro-plaintiff. By accounting for business reality and modern economics, it helps courts and enforcement agencies reach the right decision and thereby reduce the likelihood of false negatives as well as false positives....

This paper is about the regulation of bad behavior by participants on digital platforms. It shows that these platforms have private incentives to limit this bad behavior and, in fact, have rules, monitoring, and enforcement systems to do so. However, these private incentives may not provide...

The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, in the course of considering mergers and acquisitions as well as other policy matters, have conducted detailed investigations of the wired broadband business, and the intertwined business of providing linear programming....

Though network effects are important for multisided platforms, the simple winner-take-all notion that they always give larger platforms an insurmountable advantage over smaller rivals has been disproven by numerous counterexamples. It is now being argued that big data is power, so that a firm...

We propose an alternative to the LIBOR based on three pillars. (1) Banks that participate in the rate setting process would have to submit bid and ask quotes for interbank lending and commit that they would conduct transactions within that range. If they traded outside of those ranges they would...

In this comment we advance a number of guiding principles on matters of benchmark formation, administrative governance, screening, transparency and regulation, in response to the OICU-IOSCO Consultation Report on Financial Benchmarks dated January 2013 (“Report”). We are looking for...

This study provides a detailed analysis of how the Portuguese payment system operates and how regulatory interventions, especially those involving price controls, would likely affect the interest of the various stakeholders in the system including consumers, merchants, banks, schemes, and...

This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: First, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don't pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content...

This article shows that the Supreme Court reached the right outcome in Ohio et al. v. American Express. The District Court had found that American Express was a two-sided transaction platform that provided joint services simultaneously to cardholders and merchants. But it then chose, by adopting...