Walmart is one of the most successful companies in the world. With more than $ 524 billion in 2020 revenue and 2.2 million employees, Walmart is the world's largest company by sales volume and is ranked 19th on the Forbes list of the world's largest public companies. Walmart serves nearly 265...

We consider a dynamic platform competition in a market with network externalities. The incumbent platform enjoys a focal position such that consumers expect other consumers to join it, while the entrant platform may enjoy a quality advantage. We examine the effect of an antitrust policy that...

Amazon acts as both a platform operator and seller on its platform, designing rich fee policies and offering some products direct to consumers. This flexibility may improve welfare by increasing fee discrimination and reducing double marginalization, but may decrease welfare due to incentives to...

This paper conducts a retrospective analysis of a unique merger between two low cost carriers: Southwest Airlines and AirTran Airways. The paper begins with a detailed study of price effects for a variety of routes affected by the merger such as overlapping markets, markets where either carrier...

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking and ad fraud. These topics are not unique to...

Empirical evidence suggests that many mergers do not increase profits of the participating firms and decrease welfare. Due to the globalization of markets we should take an international view on mergers and their welfare effects. This paper develops a Bertrand-model of an international...

In the homogenous good case, the relationship between market structure and efficiency was studied extensively. Assuming a standard quadratic utility with quantity competition, this paper carries on the analysis in a differentiated good context. It can be shown that there is a positive...

After describing the essential features of the book market, a welfare analysis of the fixed book price agreement is given. Allowance is made for the opportunity cost of reading. Theoretically, the agreement pushes up book prices and depresses book sales. However, more titles will be published,...

Merchant guilds have been portrayed as social networks that generated beneficial social capital by sustaining shared norms, effectively transmitting information, and successfully undertaking collective action. This social capital, it is claimed, benefited society as a whole by enabling rulers to...