Governments must anticipate today's fast moving technologies to be effective. Blockchain potentially is the ideal tool to assist antitrust in enforcing regulation and fully exploiting its core principles—competition and consumer welfare. Blockchain offers antitrust an enormous opportunity and...

This article provides an overview of the competitive issues surrounding online platforms. The general theme is that while much has been made of the structural features of online platforms there is little hard evidence that these are durable monopolies. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the...

This paper explores a monopolist's incentives to provides upgraded versions of its software. In particular, the authors examine how market power, commitment problems and price discrimination may lead a monopolistice supplier of a network good to introduce upgrades when social welfare would be...

Both sides of a two-sided market are usually modeled as markets without product differentiation. Often however,it will be profit maximizing to differentiate one or two sides in two or more types. In a simple theoretical model,inspired by Yellow Pages,we show that this decision crucially depends...

Though network effects are important for multisided platforms, the simple winner-take-all notion that they always give larger platforms an insurmountable advantage over smaller rivals has been disproven by numerous counterexamples. It is now being argued that big data is power, so that a firm...

An important reason for the Internet's remarkable growth over the last quarter century is the "end-to-end" principle that networks should confine themselves to transmitting generic packets without worrying about their contents. Not only has this made deployment of internet infrastructure cheap...

Many of the leading controversies in competition policy in the last two decades, especially those surrounding the Microsoft case, reflect the challenges posed by platform industries. Unfortunately, too often economists and policymakers have drawn the wrong lessons when thinking about such...

This paper analyzes the optimal choice of pricing schedules and technological deterrence levels in a market with digital piracy where sellers can influence the degree of piracy by implementing digital rights management (DRM) systems. It is shown that a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule can...

Software firms often remove some functions of his product and sell the damaged version at a lower or zero price. This paper extends Hahn's functional degradation model into a continuous type framework, derives the conditions for introducing the read-only version, and the conditions for selling...

Firms nowadays are increasingly proactive in trying to strategically capitalize on consumer networks and social interactions. In this paper, we complement an emerging body of research on the engineering of word-of-mouth (WOM) effects by exploring a different angle through which firms can...