In response to a request for comment from the Federal Trade Commission, this report is divided into three parts:• The FTC's continuing leadership in consumer protection for Internet access• Competition and consumer protection in a changing communications industry• Competition and consumer...

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...

The liberalization of telecommunications is largely based on the premise that increasing competition will encourage investment. The hypothesis that liberalization promotes investment has received the most empirical support in recent research. However, a key question that has been largely ignored...

The purpose of this Policy Bulletin is to determine whether wireline and wireless telephone services are close enough substitutes to be effective intermodal competitors. Using the standard tools of antitrust economics, this Policy Bulletin presents evidence indicating that wireless is not an...

Digital platforms, empowered by artificial intelligence algorithms, facilitate efficient interactions between consumers and merchants that allow the collection of profiling information which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in...

Digital platforms, empowered by artificial intelligence algorithms, facilitate efficient interactions between consumers and merchants that allow the collection of profiling information which drives innovation and welfare. Private incentives, however, lead to information asymmetries resulting in...

In this article, I analyze and compare the contributions of Dupuit and Walras on the natural monopoly of railroads. Both theorists argued that inland waterways—as opposed to railroads—could be vertically unbundled, a point which previous authors who compared their views failed to point out....

We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others' trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market...

Newspaper Joint Operating Agreements (JOAs) are long term, inflexible contracts between metropolitan daily newspapers in the same market. These contracts maintain two editorial voices while combining all business operations of the two competitors in order to capture many of the scale economies...

In a companion note (Antitrust vs. Sector-specific Regulation in Telecom: What Works Best?), we argued that while the full liberalization of telecommunications markets provides scope for relying to a large extent on general antitrust rules and institutions as instruments of economic regulation,...