This is one out of a bundle of essays on the economics of antitrust. It argues that the traditional rule-of-reason approach to the assessment of business conduct erodes the predictability of law enforcement and, as a consequence, the legal certainty of the business community. As the pro- and...

This is one of a bundle of essays on the economics of antitrust. It is about the way the concept of efficiency is dealt with in competition analysis and the welfare standard of antitrust. I pay particular attention to Pareto efficiency, what it stands for and what it does not stand for, and its...

The reforms of telecommunication regulation in Mexico, adopted recently, are inspired by a mistaken diagnosis of the state of affairs in the industry. Moreover, they introduce and reinforce a type of regulation that has proved little successful elsewhere, particularly in Europe. By doing so,...

For Piketty there are two laws of capitalism and one fundamental inequality which, taken together, drive us towards a world of increasing inequality. For what is left of the twenty-first century he foresees a less meritocratic society with an enhanced role for inherited wealth. In this article I...

In Cournot games the strategic variable is output and players maximize profits assuming that the other players keep their outputs fixed. In Bertrand games the strategic variable is price and players assume the other players to keep their prices fixed. In this article I argue that it is not the...

In this article a description is given of what exactly market participants are free to do in a free market, under what conditions market freedom leads to economic efficiency, why a free-market system cannot be expected to lead to socially acceptable outcomes and how competition policy is...

There are two standard versions for one-shot oligopoly games: the Cournot game and the Bertrand game. The common feature is that in both games the strategic variables are supply curves. Under Cournot the supply curves are vertical lines in price-quantity space, under Bertrand they are horizontal...

Whether a two-sided platform faces a critical-mass problem in its start-up phase depends on how difficult it is to get each of the sides on board when the other side is not yet there – the so-called chicken-and-egg problem. If there is no chicken-and-egg problem, there is no critical-mass...

This brief note is a reply to the paper Two-sided Red Herrrings by Evans and Schmalensee (E&S), in which they denounce attempts by commentators in the American Express case to marginalize the findings of the literature on multi-sided platforms. In my view E&S are right in most of their...

In his article “Two-Sided Vs. Complementary Products” Filistrucchi explains in what respect two-sided platforms are different from firms producing complementary products, in spite of the similarity in pricing strategies. For him, the distinguishing feature of two-sided platforms is the...