Consider a bottleneck monopoly whose access charge is regulated above marginal cost and provides access to an oligopoly of downstream firms. Should the monopolist be allowed to vertically integrate into the downstream market? For the general run of oligopolistic market structures, we show that a...

We study what type of organization will host projects where talented individuals are pivotal. A cash-constrained and talented individual must invest in acquiring a skill essential to execute a project. Skill acquisition may be financed by either a corporation, which inserts the project into its...

An essential facility produces 'access', an essential input used by a competitive downstream industry. The access charge is regulated. The essential facility can vertically integrate into the downstream segment and sabotage rivals increasing their costs.We systematically study the vertical...

We present an agency model of coup attempts in autocracies. The autocrat's objectives conflict with those of the citizenry. Under the assumption that the autocrat's policy choices cannot be observed by the citizenry, but are correlated with the short-run performance of the economy we find that:...

We study how the sequence of financing of R&D varies according to the ease with which property rights over knowledge can be defined. There are two financiers: a venture capitalist (VC) and a corporation. The knowledge acquired in costly research becomes embodied in the researcher's human...

We argue that in adjudicating SEP royalty rates, courts should do what they do in pricing other assets or the flows of income they produce: rely on information from the market about the value of comparable assets or their rental rates. The comparables method is based on price theory, which...

Over the last 15 years the cellular SEP market has achieved a long-run equilibrium spanning the development, deployment and use of 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G technologies. Cumulative royalties have converged to market values, and the market has apportioned them according to the incremental value...

This paper analyses the foundations of efficient-firm regulation (implemented in Chile for almost two decades), and the formulas that are used to set the prices of water/sanitation companies, electric power distributors and the dominant phone companies. We show that efficient-firm regulation...

A large literature asserts that standard essential patents (SEPs) allow their owners to “hold up” innovation by charging fees that exceed their incremental contribution to a final product. We evaluate two central, interrelated predictions of this SEP hold-up hypothesis: (1) SEP-reliant...

Two aspects of media bias are important empirically. First, bias is persistent: it does not seem to disappear even when the media is under scrutiny. Second, bias is conflicting: different people often perceive bias in the same media outlet to be of opposite signs. We build a model in which both...