In many countries hospital regulation undergoes fundamental change. In reaction to steadily increasing costs, authorities switch from cost of service regulation to prospective payment systems (PPS). While it seems clear that this new scheme sets strong cost saving incentives, this is not so...

This study provides the first empirical test of strategic interactions in the pricing decisions of regulated utilities. Since publicly owned water utilities in Sweden are governed by a cost-of-service regulation, prices in neighboring municipalities should not affect the own price other than...

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – the FANG companies – have transformed society with both positive and negative effects. Soaring consumer access to information, news, social networks, and entertainment has been stimulated by the ever-more ubiquitous and falling...

There can be no doubt that the FANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – have transformed society since their emergence. Like all social transformations, the changes wrought by their services have had ripple effects that are both positive and negative. On...

In this study, we analyze the incentives of a streaming platform to bias consumption when products are vertically differentiated. The platform offers mixed bundles of content to monetize consumer interest in variety and pays royalties to sellers based on the effective consumption of the...

We document the following stylized facts for the Mexican retail market for gasoline using data for 2018-2019: (1) consumer prices adjust slower than wholesale prices; (2) more competition, in the form of a higher density of stations, implies lower markups and lower prices; and (3) more...

The first of both short essays deals with two structural constraints that distinguish services markets from e.g. markets for manufacturing products. The 'nearness restriction' requires that producer and consumer of the service product are present on the same location. The 'non-storability...

Die deutsche Wirtschaft steht vor großen Herausforderungen. Neben Digitalisierung und Klimawandel wird im Zuge der COVID-19-Pandemie und des russischen Angriffs auf die Ukraine auch eine mögliche Deglobalisierung diskutiert. Diese Entwicklungen wirken sich nicht zuletzt auf bestehende...

This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

We study the incentives of a streaming platform to bias consumption when products are vertically differentiated. The platform offers mixed bundles of content to monetize consumers' interest in variety and pays royalties to sellers based on the effective consumption of the content they produce....