Collusion, competition and piracy

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower cost of copying facilitates collusion but that a higherquality of the copy hinders collusion. Thus, the overall effect of thesenew characteristics of copies made by consumers is ambiguous.Collusion, competition, piracy, consumers, cost of copying,

WHY DOES THE PIRATE DECIDE TO BE THE LEADER IN PRICES?

We analyze the roles of the government and the incumbent in preventing piracy, and the reasons and incentives why a pirate would want to be a leader in prices. The framework of analysis used is a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation with price competition, where both incumbent and pirate are committed to keep their prices. We find that both government and incumbent have a key role in avoiding the entry of the pirate. We show that the government will not help the incumbent to become a monopolist, even if he installs an antipiracy system, because a monopoly provides the lowest social welfare. However, he will let the pirate enters as a follower or as a leader, or encourage the incumbent to deter the entry of the pirate, which depends on the technology of the government for monitoring piracy. The pirate decides to become a leader to avoid being brought down by the incumbent and the government, although the leader's profit is lower than the follower's profit. Finally, we find that high-income countries with cheaper monitoring technology have lower piracy rates.Pirate, Incumbent, Government, Price Leadership, Copy, Monitoring Piracy, Income

Lobbyin to prevent commercial piracy

In this paper we develop a common agency model to analyze the problem of pirates entering the market, in which the incumbent and the consumers form pressure groups to lobby the government on policies to prevent piracy while the pirates try to avoid being stopped. We show that a monopoly is not an equilibrium when both the incumbent and consumers lobby the government, and that the cost of monitoring commercial piracy is very important in determining (truthful) equilibria, as is the case where there is no lobby competition. However, it is now more difficult getting the pirate to enter the market.Common Agency, Lobbying, Commercial Piracy, Incumbent, Consumers and Government

Investigación y nuevas tecnologías de la comunicación en la enseñanza: el futuro inmediato

Nuevos canales de comunicación están transformando el campo de las comunicaciones. Las redes de comunicación, que hoy cubren la totalidad del mundo desarrollado, están propiciando una transformación de muchos de los criterios y principios que parecían inmutables. La llegada de estos canales a la enseñanza ya ha comenzado y no se ha realizado la reflexión previa de lo que ello significa y de los cambios estructurales a los que obliga. Este trabajo pretende abrir interrogantes e iniciar líneas de investigación que hagan posible una incorporación consciente de estos canales a los procesos de enseñanza, de forma que ello no signifique una imposición comercial o social sino una utilización pedagógicamente adecuada de los mismos

Privatization policies by national and regional governments

In order to analyze the privatization policies undertaken by the national and regional governments, we consider a horizontal differentiation model with price competition in which a country consists of two regions of different sizes. We show that public-sector intervention by either the national or regional government is essential for achieving the social optimum, because a private duopoly does not achieve the social optimum. However, not all public interventions in firms are better than the private duopoly. On the other hand, the preferences of consumers and firms about privatization policy are completely opposite. Finally, the privatization policies of regional governments are completely opposite from one region to the other, and do not coincide with that of the national government. Overall, this paper shows that the relative size of regions is an important feature in the design of the privatization policies implemented by national and regional governments

Versioning goods and joint purchase: substitution and complementary strategies

We analyze the monopolist’s decision about how to design different versions of a good, i.e. whether to make them substitutes or complements, when consumers can buy them simultaneously. In this context, we find that versioning goods as substitutes or complements may be optimal for the monopolist, and the final result depends on the degree of concavity and convexity of the cost function.Financial support from Spanish MCYT under the Project SEJ2007-62081/ECON

Choice of Metrics used in Collaborative Filtering and their Impact on Recommender Systems

The capacity of recommender systems to make correct predictions is essentially determined by the quality and suitability of the collaborative filtering that implements them. The common memory-based metrics are Pearson correlation and cosine, however, their use is not always the most appropriate or sufficiently justified. In this paper, we analyze these two metrics together with the less common mean squared difference (MSD) to discover their advantages and drawbacks in very important aspects such as the impact when introducing different values of k-neighborhoods, minimization of the MAE error, capacity to carry out a sufficient number of predictions, percentage of correct and incorrect predictions and behavior when attempting to recommend the n-best items. The paper lists the results and practical conclusions that have been obtained after carrying out a comparative study of the metrics based on 135 experiments on the MovieLens database of 100,000 ratios

Crisis económica, salud e intervención psicosocial en España

La crisis económica que tuvo sus inicios en verano de 2008 ha impactado negativamente en los ámbitos psicológico, social y comunitario de las personas. Asimismo, las políticas basadas en la austeridad que se implementaron por parte de muchos gobiernos debilitaron los sistemas de protección social, lo que contribuyó a incrementar la vulnerabilidad de las personas que más sufrieron la crisis conduciendo, en muchos casos, a procesos o resultados de exclusión. En este trabajo hacemos, en primer lugar, una aproximación a las consecuencias negativas que la crisis ha producido en la salud mental de la población general y, especialmente, en dos de los grupos sociales más vulnerables como son la infancia/juventud y las personas migradas. También se analizan los efectos negativos de la crisis en la convivencia comunitaria, especialmente sobre las relaciones interculturales en una sociedad cada vez más multicultural. En segundo lugar, y dado que los datos de la investigación han puesto de relieve la importancia de factores psicosociales como moderadores de esos efectos negativos de la crisis económica sobre la salud y el bienestar psicológico, describimos algunas propuestas de intervención psicosocial que tienen en cuenta el apoyo a las familias, la mejora de las redes sociales, el empoderamiento de personas, grupos y comunidades, o la mejora de la competencia cultural de los servicios comunitarios.The economic crisis that began in the summer of 2008 has had a negative impact on the psychological, social and community spheres of people. In addition, the austerity policies implemented by many governments have weakened social protection systems, which have contributed to increase the vulnerability of the people who suffered most from the crisis, leading in many cases to processes of exclusion. In this paper, we evaluate the negative consequences that the crisis has had on the mental health of the general population, with a focus on two of the most vulnerable social groups such as children / youth and migrants. We further analyze the negative effects of the crisis on community life, in particular on intercultural relations in an increasingly multicultural society. Our data highlights the importance of psychosocial factors as moderators of the crisis’ negative effects on health and psychological well-being, which prompted us to describe some proposals for psychosocial intervention that take into account support for families, social network improvement, and empowerment of people, groups and communities, or cultural competency of community services