In this collection of papers we first analyze the evolution of the Italian food industry and the retail trade sector during the past decade (Chapters 1 and 2). Chapter 3 describes the structure of large retailers and buying groups in Italy. Chapter 4 proposes alternative measures of the degree...

Communities worldwide have been wrestling with issues associated with chain stores proliferation. Many have explored and enacted chain store entry barriers in response, but how such regulations affect mom-and-pop businesses is still largely debated. The impact of chain store entry barriers on...

This paper studies competition in prices and opening hours in a model with free entry. It is shown that under free competition a market failure arises: Entry is excessive and opening hours are under-provided. Restrictions on opening hours aggravate this failure. I analyze the impact of a...

This paper economically analyzes the benefits and concerns of the sharing economy and derives policy implications that could help to achieve the expected benefits and respond appropriately to any concerns. Primary benefits anticipated from the sharing economy are the creation of new transactions...

The rise of the fourth industrial revolution (IR) is deeply embedded in a wider context of privatization of knowledge, rising costs of innovation and uneven distribution of capacity between countries. But debates on a ‘balanced' policy framework to tackle these issues have until now floundered...

The non-monetary costs consumers experience from regulations are challenging to quantify, and thus easily overlooked. Using quasi-experimental policy variation and high-frequency supermarket data, this paper identifies previously hidden time costs from policies that ban or tax the use of...

We study the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com. These reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We hand-collect data on these markets to characterise the types of products that buy fake reviews and then collect large amounts of data on the...

The digital economy has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years, mostly as a result of new digital technologies that are promoting a global transformation to industry 4.0. The resulting expansion of digital trade has sparked off a political and policy controversy on digital economy and...

The idea of deregulating shopping hours brings strong opposition from many groups in the society. Surprisingly, even many consumers oppose deregulation. The paper rationalizes this behavior by considering heterogeneous consumers who differ in their earnings abilities. If a majority of families...

We examine how policies for the ownership and control of consumer-generated data affect market outcomes in the online advertising industry. When advertisers have strong property rights over data regarding consumers' active purchase interests, competition between ad exchanges leads to too little...