I study the capacity of business associations - private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members - to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, my theoretical framework connects the...

There are no generally accepted results regarding the objectives, decisions, and economic outcomes of nonprofit organizations, as compared to forprodit or public firms. We posit that this inconclusiveness is due to a too broad definition of nonprofits and that different types of nonprofits...

We study the capacity of business associations|private, formal, noncommercial organizations designed to promote the common business interests of their members|to support contract enforcement and collective action. Inspired by recent empirical literature, our theoretical framework connects the...

Should mergers among nonprofit organizations be assessed differently than mergers among for-profit firms? A recent debate in law and economics, boosted by apparently one-sided court decisions, has produced the result that promoting competition is socially valuable regardless of the particular...

This paper studies competition in data-driven markets, that is, markets where the cost of quality production is decreasing in the amount of machine-generated data about user preferences or characteristics, which is an inseparable byproduct of using services offered in such markets. This gives...

The recent rise of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) is changing markets, politics, organizations, and societies. It also affects the domain of research. Supported by new statistical methods that rely on computational power and computer science --- data science methods --- we are now...

Standard-setting organizations (SSOs) are collectively self-governed industry associations, formed by innovators and implementers. They are the main organizational form to agree on and manage technical standards, which have significant positive welfare effects. SSO self-governance avoids...

To prevent data-driven markets from tipping towards monopoly, policy makers should consider the introduction of data-sharing requirements in specific sectors. Inspiration on how to reconcile the interests of competition, innovation and data protection can be drawn from legislative initiatives

Are business associations - private, formal, nonprofit organizations designed to promote the common interests of their members - positive or negative for the economy and overall welfare? Scholars from institutional and organizational economics, on the one side, and from industrial organization,...

Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit.We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off...