This paper studies asymmetric platforms' incentives for enforcing exclusivity on multihoming sellers. We show that exclusivity benefits a platform only when its service is not very valuable to sellers, and hence can be initiated by a weak platform rather than the stronger one. It is possible for...

Trademark law is incoherent, and it fails to manage all the interests at stake in the modern business environment. This failure flows from a core misunderstanding. Trademark law has not grasped that is managing brands, not trademarks. In this article, Professor Deven Desai develops a new theory...

Italian Abstract: Nel caso di una filiera verticale di produzione in cui siano necessari forti investimenti di capitale fisso in qualche segmento ci si chiede quale sia la composizione di forme di mercato più efficiente dal punto di vista sociale (soluzione integrata del pianificatore sociale)...

As technology and interconnectivity have continued to flourish, so too has an important and complex form of enterprise: the platform. Services like Uber, Google Search, Hulu, and American Express cater to distinct but deeply-interdependent “sides” of customers that derive value or revenues...

In a vertical market experiment featuring a wholesale market and a retail market we investigate the countervailing power hypothesis of Galbraith (1952). Counter to standard models of imperfect competition this hypothesis proposes that increasing concentration of retail firms might be beneficial...

This paper analyzes supply tariffs that discriminate between resale in different markets. In a setting with competing retailers that operate in multiple (independent or interdependent) markets, we show that, all else equal, a monopolist supplier wants to discriminate against resale in the market...

The central claim of this Article is that, as a descriptive matter, trademark legislation and court interpretation is a close normative match with the Chicago School approach of scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner. The organizing intellectual structure of modern trademark law, as...

Predatory pricing doctrine is currently a dead area of the law. To proceed beyond summary judgment, a plaintiff must prove the predation created a “dangerous probability” of supracompetitive pricing as the mechanism for recouping the losses “invested” in the predation. This requires...

Brands matter. In modern times, brands and brand management have become a central feature of the modern economy and a staple of business theory and business practice. Coca-Cola, Nike, Google, Disney, Apple, Microsoft, BMW, Marlboro, IBM, Kellogg’s, Louis-Vuitton, and Virgin are all large...