Viele Bürgerinnen und Bürger in Deutschland heute überaus skeptisch gegenüber neuen Technologien und Innovationen, ganz gleich ob es um Gentechnik, Biotechnologie, Fracking oder die Digitalisierung geht. Hinzu kommt eine große Skepsis gegenüber zahlreichen Infrastrukturvorhaben sowie ganz...

The question how mergers affect innovation has gained prominence in a number of recent merger cases. Accounting for the likely effects of mergers on innovation is difficult for a number of reasons though. First of all, the relationship between market concentration and innovation is far from...

"Daten sind das Öl des 21. Jahrhunderts" - dieser im Kontext der Datenökonomie häufig zitierte Satz weist auf die enorme Kapitalverschiebung hin, die innerhalb der letzten Jahre stattgefunden hat: Internet-Giganten wie Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Apple, Microsoft, Tencent und Facebook sind...

This paper summarizes the economic principles of European state aid control. We start with a discussion of the economic justification for state aid control, including the definition of state aid in European law and exceptions to the general ban of state aid. We then explore the motives for...

This paper summarizes the peculiarities of online markets and discusses recent antitrust cases related to online markets. Following a brief description of the online markets' characteristics and potential tendencies for concentration the paper first discusses the antitrust allegations and...

This paper analyses the extent of inter-format retail competition between supermarkets, discounters and drugstores in Germany, using data from the German market for diapers. We estimate a random coefficient logit model at the individual household level. Based on consumer substitution patterns,...

This papers analyses how horizontal mergers affect innovation activities of the merged entity and its non-merging competitors. We develop an oligopoly model with heterogeneous firms to derive empirically testable implications. Our model predicts that a merger is more likely to be profitable in...