The burgeoning digital economy is characterized by providers offering their products and services to consumers in bundles. This is hardly surprising, given that the non-rival, non-excludable and infinitely expansible characteristics of digital goods with marginal cost of zero strongly favor use...

Are dominant online search engines monopolies enjoying low contest-ability, due to high barriers to entry, or innovative first-movers? This paper argues that dominant online search engines maintain their leadership through an “innovation feedback loop”: a process whereby increasing R&D...

Robert Bork's Antitrust Paradox (1978) has been justification for lack of antitrust behavior for over four decades. His test essentially asks if consumers are harmed by the pricing practices of the firm in the market in which they purchase the good or service. Even if these firms are monopoly or...

We analyze the incentives of internet service providers (ISPs) to break net neutrality by excluding internet applications competing with their own products, a typical example being the exclusion of VoIP applications by telecom companies offering internet and voice services. Exclusion is not a...

Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

This article provides an overview of the competitive issues surrounding online platforms. The general theme is that while much has been made of the structural features of online platforms there is little hard evidence that these are durable monopolies. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the...

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) initiative, which is set to introduce ex ante regulatory rules for “gatekeepers” in online platform markets, is one of the most important pieces of legislation to emanate from Brussels in recent decades. It not only has the potential to...

This article presents and analyses the results of a large-scale empirical study in which over 11,000 consumers from ten countries in five continents were surveyed about their use, perceptions and understanding of online platform services. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first...

Investments in Generating Capacities between a monopolist and two competing firms are compared where the firms invest in their capacity and fix the retail price while electricity demand is uncertain. A unit price auction determines the wholesale electricity price when the firms compete. They...