The next generation of e-commerce will be conducted by digital agents, based on algorithms that will not only make purchase recommendations, but will also predict what we want, make purchase decisions, negotiate and execute the transaction for the consumers, and even automatically form...

Many believe that consumer-sourced reputational information about products would increasingly replace top-down regulation. Instead of protecting consumers through coercive laws, reputational information gleaned from the wisdom of the crowd would guide consumer decision making. There is now a...

This paper deals with trade platforms whose operators not only allow third party sellers to offer their products to consumers, but also offer products themselves. In this context, the platform operator faces a hold-up problem if he uses classical twopart tariffs only as potential competition...

The Internet of Things is at risk of becoming a victim of its own popularity. Today, the IoT market is generating $200 billion in revenue, a number expected to triple in the next 10 years. But a rush to market by developers of consumer IoT products and services has been accompanied by shortcuts...

The move from traditional to open-access journals — which charge no subscription fees, only submission fees — is gaining support in academia. We analyze a two-sided-market model in which journals cannot commit to subscription fees when authors (who prefer low subscription fees because this...

This paper demonstrates that, under a set of weak assumptions, increased product differentiation will make it more difficult to sustain collusion when it is costly either to coordinate or to maintain collusion. These results contrast with the previous theoretical literature, which shows that, in...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals as...

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it seeks to contribute to a more fine-grained comparison between US antitrust and EU competition law by (selectively) including state antitrust laws as well as laws that pursue objectives different from the antitrust laws but interfere with the aims of...