A Strategic Guide on Two-Sided Markets Applied to the ISP Market

This paper looks at a new body of literature that deals with two-sided markets and focuses on the Internet Service Provider (ISP) segment. ISPs seem to act as a platform enabling transactions between web sites and end consumers. We propose a strategic guide for ISPs that covers features of two-sided markets such as strong externalities and discuss how these market characteristics can affect competition policy.Platform; externalities; price allocation; competition policy

Horizontal Mergers in Internet

Our work concerns the Internet network. We propose to modify the traditional analysis of the theoretical economic literature which emphasizes on the vertical integration among backbones and ISPs, and his difficulties because IBPs have a strongmarket power. We propose to build a sequential game in two stages. We consider on the downstream market a competition between ISP horizontally differentiated, while on the upstream market, the IBP compete à la Cournot. In absence of regulation on the upstream, we find that, a merger among ISPs can under certain conditions decrease the access charge, by valorizing of the positive externalities in installed bases. Such a result can justify a softer anti-trust authorities. judgment.

Trial and settlement negotiations between asymmetrically skilled parties

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the (equilibrium) plaintiff's win rate. The paper analyses pretrial negotiations and revisits the selection hypothesis in the case where these legal expenditures are private information. This assumption is consistent with empirical evidence (Osborne, 1999). Two alternative situations are investigated, depending on whether there exists a unilateral or a bilateral informational asymmetry.\ Our general result is that efficient pretrial negotiations select cases with the smallest legal expenditures as those going to trial, while cases with largest costs prefer to settle. Under the one-sided asymmetric information assumption, we find that the American rule yields more trials and higher aggregate legal expenditures than the French and British rules. The two-sided case leads to a higher rate of trials, but in contrast provides less clear-cut predictions regarding the influence of fee-shifting.litigation, unilateral and bilateral asymmetric information, legal expenditures

Fonctions du paysage dans Partie de campagne de Jean Renoir

Cest à la Renaissance que lon situe lémergence de deux notions qui apparaissent de façon concomitante : le paysage et lindividu. Le paysage se définit par la perception dun espace naturel ou anthropisé depuis le point de vue dun observateur : il ny a de paysage que par lentremise dun sujet percevant. Deux questions se posent alors. Dune part, celle des rapports que lindividu entretient à la nature qui lentoure dans la littérature, la peinture et le cinéma : le paysage apparaît-il dans le texte ou limage comme une toile de fond dont se dissocient les personnages ou bien constitue-t-il un élément avec lequel les personnages entretiennent une relation de proximité, voire de fusion? Dautre part se pose la question de la fonction du paysage dans le récit : fait-il lobjet dun sens codé contribuant à la narration en représentant de façon symbolique les sentiments et la psychologie des personnages de fiction, ou bien est-il relégué par lécrivain, le peintre ou le cinéaste à lambiguïté et à la vacance du sens

A Strategic Guide on Two-Sided Markets Applied to the ISP Market

This paper looks at a new body of literature that deals with two-sided markets and focuses on the Internet Service Provider (ISP) segment. ISPs seem to act as a platform enabling transactions between web sites and end consumers. We propose a strategic guide for ISPs that covers features of two-sided markets such as strong externalities and discuss how these market characteristics can affect competition policy

Trial and settlement negotiations between asymmetrically skilled parties

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the (equilibrium) plaintiff's win rate. The paper analyses pretrial negotiations and revisits the selection hypothesis in the case where these legal expenditures are private information. This assumption is consistent with empirical evidence (Osborne, 1999). Two alternative situations are investigated, depending on whether there exists a unilateral or a bilateral informational asymmetry.\ Our general result is that efficient pretrial negotiations select cases with the smallest legal expenditures as those going to trial, while cases with largest costs prefer to settle. Under the one-sided asymmetric information assumption, we find that the American rule yields more trials and higher aggregate legal expenditures than the French and British rules. The two-sided case leads to a higher rate of trials, but in contrast provides less clear-cut predictions regarding the influence of fee-shifting

Horizontal mergers on platform markets: cost savings v. cross-group network effects?

We study the impact of cost savings on the outcome of horizontal mergers between two-sided platforms. We consider four symmetrically differentiated platforms located equidistantly on the unit circle and competing in membership fees. Users on both sides single-home, and we allow for both positive and negative cross-group externalities. We find that the impact of merger cost savings on prices is generally not monotonic, and that synergies are necessary for horizontal platform mergers to be Pareto-improving. Furthermore, the merger may benefit users on one side while harming users on the opposite side, which raises some interesting questions for the enforcement of merger control on two-sided markets

Trial and settlement negotiations between asymmetrically skilled parties

Parties engaged in a litigation generally enter the discovery process with different informations regarding their case and/or an unequal endowment in terms of skill and ability to produce evidence and predict the outcome of a trial. Hence, they have to bear different legal costs to assess the (equilibrium) plaintiff's win rate. The paper analyses pretrial negotiations and revisits the selection hypothesis in the case where these legal expenditures are private information. This assumption is consistent with empirical evidence (Osborne, 1999). Two alternative situations are investigated, depending on whether there exists a unilateral or a bilateral informational asymmetry.\ Our general result is that efficient pretrial negotiations select cases with the smallest legal expenditures as those going to trial, while cases with largest costs prefer to settle. Under the one-sided asymmetric information assumption, we find that the American rule yields more trials and higher aggregate legal expenditures than the French and British rules. The two-sided case leads to a higher rate of trials, but in contrast provides less clear-cut predictions regarding the influence of fee-shifting

Horizontal mergers on platform markets: cost savings v. cross-group network effects?

We study the impact of cost savings on the outcome of horizontal mergers between two-sided platforms. We consider four symmetrically differentiated platforms located equidistantly on the unit circle and competing in membership fees. Users on both sides single-home, and we allow for both positive and negative cross-group externalities. We find that the impact of merger cost savings on prices is generally not monotonic, and that synergies are necessary for horizontal platform mergers to be Pareto-improving. Furthermore, the merger may benefit users on one side while harming users on the opposite side, which raises some interesting questions for the enforcement of merger control on two-sided markets

Market Power and Collusion on Interconnection Phone Market in Tunisia : What Lessons from International Experiences

We try in this paper to characterize the state of mobile phone market in Tunisia. Our study is based on a survey of foreign experience (Europe) in detecting collusive behavior and a comparison of the critical threshold of collusion between operators in developing countries like Tunisia. The market power is estimated based on the work of Parker Roller (1997) and the assumption of "Balanced Calling Pattern". We use then the model of Friedman (1971) to compare the critical threshold of collusion. We show that the "conduct parameter" measuring the intensity of competition is not null during the period 1993-2011. Results show also that collusion is easier on the Tunisian market that on the Algerian, Jordanian, or Moroccan one