Ex Post Regulation Facilitates Collusion

Under ex ante access regulation entrants often claim that access fees are excessive. I show that this is only the case if further entry is admitted. If the entrant is protected from further entry it would agree with the incumbent upon a strictly positive access fee which may exceed the efficient level. Ex post regulation facilitates this type of collusion and should be abandoned. --entry deterrence,access regulation,network infrastructure,vertical differentiation

Do Consumers Benefit from Concentration in the New Economy? A Review of Google's Mergers, Acquisitions, and Arrangements

Within the last three years, Google has acquired YouTube and DoubleClick and has attempted to control part of Yahoo!'s search advertising business. Two of the deals have not raised antitrust concerns by competition authorities. I review these deals with a focus on consumer welfare. Consumers are affected by being on one side of a multisided platform. Provided that better matches of search ads are beneficial, I demonstrate that the mergers may have positive effects for consumers through better matches between users and search ads. However, this does not substitute an in-depth antitrust assessment of the deals. --merger control,multisided platforms,screening mechanism

Liberalization of the Postal Service Market in Europe: Entry with Universal Service and Partial Coverage

In the advent of postal market liberalization in several European countries we expect that the incumbent operators anticipate entry by competitors who are not required to offer universal service, i.e. coverage of the entire country and uniform pricing. The market for postal service exhibits stronger network effects than in telecommunications because of limited interconnection. In the present paper we model entrants which can opt for a partial geographical coverage and who enter with a higher service quality than the incumbent. This allows to predict possible deterrence or accommodating strategies by the incumbent. We show that dependent on the shape of the network costs and the network effects entrants may either offer a low quality in order to mitigate competition or offer a higher quality in order to restrict the entrant's geographical coverage. --regulation,liberalization,postal services

Assessing the effects of a road surfacing cartel in Switzerland

The paper assesses the impact of the detection of a hard-core cartel in the Swiss market for road surfacing on post-cartel competition. In addition to an investigation of supply-side factors, demand-side factors, and market prices, the paper also derives estimates of the economic effects of the decision. The results indicate that the detection of the cartel may have led to short-term price reductions; however, the persistent collusion-friendly industry structure forecloses larger and durable gains for the customers. --Competition Policy,Evaluation,Cartels,Switzerland

Advances in the design and engineering of peptide-binding repeat proteins

The specific recognition of peptides, which we define to include unstructured regions or denatured forms of proteins, is an intrinsic part of a multitude of biochemical assays and procedures. Many cellular interactions are also based on this principle as well. While it would be highly desirable to have a stockpile of sequence-specific binders for essentially any sequence, a de novo selection of individual binders against every possible target peptide sequence would be rather difficult to reduce to practice. Modular peptide binders could overcome this problem, as preselected and/or predesigned modules could be reused for the generation of new binders and thereby revolutionize the generation of binding proteins. This minireview summarizes advances in the development of peptide binders and possible scaffolds for their design

Adhesion Properties of Hydrogen on Sb(111) Probed by Helium Atom Scattering

We have carried out a series of helium atom scattering measurements in order to characterise the adsorption properties of hydrogen on antimony(111). Molecular hydrogen does not adsorb at temperatures above 110 K in contrast to pre-dissociated atomic hydrogen. Depending on the substrate temperature, two different adlayer phases of atomic hydrogen on Sb(111) occur. At low substrate temperatures ($110~$K), the deposited hydrogen layer does not show any ordering while we observe a perfectly ordered $(1\times 1)$ H/Sb(111) structure for deposition at room temperature. Furthermore, the amorphous hydrogen layer deposited at low temperature forms an ordered overlayer upon heating the crystal to room temperature. Hydrogen starts to desorb at $T_m = 430~$K which corresponds to a desorption energy of $E_{des}=(1.33\pm0.06)~$eV. Using measurements of the helium reflectivity during hydrogen exposure at different surface temperatures, we conclude that the initial sticking coefficient of atomic hydrogen on Sb(111) decreases with increasing surface temperature. Furthermore, the scattering cross section for the diffuse scattering of helium from hydrogen on Sb(111) is determined as \Sigma = (12 \pm 1)~\mbox{\AA}^{2}.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

John Patrick McGregor Interview

Transcript of an oral history interview with John Patrick McGregor by John Ernst on his experiences during the Vietnam War on July 9, 1997