Centralization of public procurement can lower prices for the government's direct purchase of goods and services. This paper focuses on indirect savings. Public administrations that do not procure directly through a central procurement agency might benefit from the availability of...

The news industry in the United States faces a funding crisis because the tech giants, particularly Google and Facebook, have acceded to the advertising monopolies once enjoyed by the newspaper industry itself. Despite the best efforts of the news industry to paint the tech giants as rapacious...

This paper empirically analyzes the effect of the widely used agency model on the retail prices of e-books in United Kingdom. Using a unique cross-sectional data set of e-book prices for a large sample of book titles across all major publishing houses, we exploit cross-genre and cross-publisher...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination of English. The population speaking English as a first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the...

Media industries are important drivers of popular culture. A large fraction of leisure time is devoted to radio, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and television (the illustrative example henceforth). Most advertising expenditures are incurred for these media. They are also mainly supported...

We document the existence of pricing styles in the concert industry. Artists differ in the extent to which they rely on second- and third-degree price discrimination, and in the probability of their concerts selling out. Most strikingly, artists who use multiple seating categories are more...

We study how experts influence consumer behavior and welfare by focusing on the Booker Prize. Leveraging the discontinuity created by the attribution of the prize, we show that readers receive the signal sent by the jury of the Booker and are persuaded to buy the awarded book but experience...

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between asymmetric regulation on mobile termination rates and mobile retail prices, using panel data collected from 20 OECD member countries for 22 quarters. In addition to the asymmetry of mobile access charges, the authors also focus on the...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

This volume brings together the statements delivered during a discussion forum organized by the Austrian Ministry for Economic Affairs and Labour. A number of articles deal with competition policies on the EU and national levels. They include an introductory statement by Nobel Laureate Joseph E....