Horizontal mergers are usually under the scrutiny of antitrust authorities due to their potential undesirable effects on prices and consumer surplus. Ex-post evidence, however, suggests that not always these effects take place and even relevant mergers may end up having negligible price effects....

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production...

The fight against cartels is a priority for antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. What differs between the EU and the US is not the basic toolkit for achieving deterrence, but to whom it is targeted. In the EU, pecuniary sanctions against the firm are the only instruments...

Two of the main pillars of the EU waste collection policy are the Proximity Principle and Self-Sufficiency Principle. According to those, waste should be disposed as close as possible to where it has been produced. The effect of such provision is to increase the market power of local disposers,...

We rationalize several facts emerging from the recent empirical research on cooperatives owned by workers (workers' firms, WF) as: the concern of WFs for employment; the interplay between membership and workplace safeguard within WFs; the different reaction to shocks between WFs and...

The "spokes model" takes the name from its graphical visualisation, that resembles the spokes of a bike's wheel. It describes a market as a collection of spokes, joining at a common centre, where consumers are located. Firms may be situated at the extreme of these spokes, at the interior of the...

We study the incentives of a social network to control two types of information circulating on its platform, namely display advertising by two quality-differentiated firms and "social information" (purchasing decisions shared among consumers). Consumers' choices are influenced by both of these...

Data brokers collect, manage, and sell customer data. We propose a simple model, in which data brokers sell data to downstream firms. We characterise the optimal strategy of data brokers and highlight the role played by the data structure for co-opetition. If data are “sub-additive”, with...

The choice of specialization affects firms' brand perception by consumers and it is of crucial importance for their profitability in competitive markets. We model how firms choose specialization through a spatial non-localized competition framework that naturally allows for markets where not all...