In its Digital Single Market strategy, the European Commission has rightly noted the importance of reducing the price paid for basic cross-border parcel delivery by consumers and by small and medium size retail senders. The payment flows for cross-border parcel delivery are strikingly similar to...

This report presents empirical evidence about the obstacles that European consumers face when trying to buy online goods and services in other EU Member States. It relies on data from a consumer survey carried out in February-March 2015 in the EU28. By comparing named websites with respondents'...

This report presents empirical evidence about the internationalisation of European online firms. After describing some characteristics that define the internationalisation of firms engaged in online activities, it mainly focuses on the obstacles that these firms face when trying to sell their...

In this paper, we present the results of a study which investigated the welfare impact of lifting geo-blocking restrictions to cross-border e-commerce in the EU, using a dataset for consumer electronics products in ten European countries for the period 2012-2105. We simulated two counterfactual...

This paper studies the effects of delivery costs on cross-border e-commerce flows in the EU. For this purpose, we use surveys carried out in 2015 on firms and consumers, to analyse the supply and demand side separately. The paper first offers some descriptive statistics on the issues of delivery...

A cross-border e-commerce Mystery Shopping Survey conducted in 2015, finds that the practice of erecting virtual barriers is still common in cross-border e-commerce within the EU, as it was in 2009. Electrical appliances, electronics and computer games are particularly difficult to buy online...

Despite the rapidly growing volume and economic importance of data in the digital economy, the legal framework for data ownership, access and trade remains incompletely defined in the EU and elsewhere. De facto data ownership dominates and often leads to fragmentation or anti-commons problems in...

This study measures the extent of cross-border geo-blocking and the impact on product availability and pricing for three non-audio-visual digital media products (music, e-books and games) in the EU Digital Single Market. We find that cross-border access to online media stores is generally...

This paper describes the different forces that shape the market structure of four different "online platform ecosystems" and the competition between them. The paper focuses on the following categories of platforms, which represent a wide scope of online activities: (i) e-commerce marketplaces;...