Over the last years, several reports highlighted the market power of very large online platforms that are gatekeeping intermediaries between businesses and consumers, and the difficulty for classic competition policy tools to deal effectively with anti-competitive practices in these platforms....

This paper explores one particular vector of entrepreneurship in nanotechnologies: public R&D funding. Drawing mainly from official archival databases and focused interviews I do a comparative study of the EU and US public R&D funding systems. My emphasis is on institutional funding coming from...

For many countries worldwide, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the backbones of their economy, more than half of the overall world population is working for SMEs. Historically, research studies on SME lending have emphasised that SMEs are less transparent and have an information advantage...

Using data from 1,226 matches played over 18 seasons, we analyse match attendances in the group stages of the European Rugby Cup (ERC). We find that short-run (match) uncertainty had little effect on attendances. This finding is significant as the ERC has been replaced by a new competition which...

The paper presents results from two natural experiments on the impact of revenue sharing and salary caps on competitive balance in sports leagues arising from the introduction of professionalism in Rugby Union in 1995. The first involves the English Premiership, which traditionally applied a...

Rugby union only went professional in 1995, much later than other major team sports resulting in major changes in league structures. Different arrangements regarding revenue sharing and salary caps between the three main European rugby leagues provides an opportunity to test the impact of such...

The economic literature on professional sports leagues suggests supporters' utility depends on uncertainty of outcome (competitive balance) and the quality of play. Unlike soccer, where the Champions League is dominated by teams from larger countries, our analysis indicates that the ERC exhibits...

The paper analyses the impact of the relatively belated move to professionalism in Rugby Union. We use data on match attendance for 3,667 fixtures in European club Rugby over 15 seasons to estimate the effect of competitive balance on attendance. We find that (short- and medium-term) competitive...

Platforms acting as sales channels for producers often charge users for access, via a subscription fee or a markup on hardware. We compare two common forms of vertical pricing agreement that platforms use with sellers: per-unit and proportional fees. In particular, we analyze the critical role...

There are very few industries that can attract the attention of Congress, multiple federal and state agencies, consumer groups, economists, antitrust lawyers, the business community, farmers, ranchers, and academics as the agriculture workshops have. Of course, with intense interest from...