Topic Competition and Regulation

Common Ownership Patterns in the European Banking Sector –The Impact of the Financial Crisis

The 16th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and the Vereinigung der Freunde e.V. (VdF) des DIW Berlin and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin which takes place twice a year, in the Spring and in...

BigTech and Start-Ups: Multi-Product Mergers and Innovation

The acquisitions of startups by Google, Amazon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft have steadily increased over the past years and have become more diversified. The current discussion about strategic motives for such acquisitions is vivid – especially in light of present concerns about the market power of gatekeepers, faster technological advances and digitalization. The principal question remains whether...

Cancelled: 10th BCCP Research Day

Leibniz ScienceCampusBerlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) Research Day At this BCCP Research Day (formerly known as BCCP Forum), Fellows will give short pitches of their current research. Since we also want to have enough time for discussions and networking, we plan long coffee breaks between the presentation sessions as well as get-together afterwards. The event will bring together all...

The 15th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart...

How Divestitures Affect Bargaining Power

This paper studies how bargaining power is affected by merger and divestiture policies. I provide a new empirical framework to compute bounds on brand-level bargaining weights using widely available sales data. Next, I exploit the variation in brand ownership caused by a large merger, cleared conditional on divestiture, in the U.S. deodorant market, to quantify the extent to which divestitures...

What is the Right Geographic Market Definition?

What is the “right” geographic definition of relevant markets? We study how unexpected and exogenous increases in excise duties in petroleum products were passed-through to retail prices in the Athens region and examine how the degree of the pass-through varies across different geographic relevant markets. Using various definitions of the relevant geographic market, we find that the most...

When Competition is not Desired: the Case of Antibiotic Prescribing

Antibiotics are effective in treating bacterial infections. However, the excessive usage of antibiotics leads to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which significantly reduces their effectiveness. Current strategies to address antibiotic resistance mainly target primary care physicians, who serve as the gatekeepers of antibiotic prescriptions in many countries. Therefore, it is...

Government Ownership and Competition: Evidence from the European Airline Industry

This paper empirically analyses the impact of government ownership on competition in monopoly and duopoly markets. We use the European Airline Industry as a laboratory. In our empirical strategy we exploit two sources of exogenous variations that allow us to cleanly filter out the effect of government ownership on the likelihood of exit. First, we study government ownership that was triggered by a...

Limited Price Competition Among Real Estate Agents and the Role of Inattention

This paper relates incomplete price competition among real estate agents to inattentive home sellers. I exploit a recent legal reform in Germany which specifically aimed to increase price competition among real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform backfired and real estate agents exploited the transition to increase their total commission rate by 0.3...