Present Projects


Competition and Regulation in the Spanish Telecoms Market  (PDF, 1173 Kb)  
Ángel L. López with the collaboration of Sandra Jódar. Supervised by Xavier Vives

The main objective of this project is to provide an overview of the recent performance of the Spanish telecommunications sector, and to provide an analysis of the current status of regulation and competition in the relevant markets that is grounded in the economic theory of industrial organisation and regulation. This report intends to contribute to the ongoing debate on the appropriate regulation of the Spanish market, to highlight areas where further progress is required and ultimately to derive from the analysis some policy recommendations.


Competition Policy in the EU. Fifty Years on from the Treaty of Rome
Xavier Vives, Philip Lowe, Jorge Padilla, John Vickers, Massimo Motta, Bruce Lyons, David Spector, Martin Hellwig, Jordi Gual, Elena Carletti, Richard Green, William E. Kovacic.

This book is the product of a conference organized by the Public-Private Research Center of IESE Business School in commemoration of the 50 years of the Treaty of Rome and of the 50 years of IESE. The aim of the conference was to take stock and look ahead in the development and implementation of competition policy in the European Union, with the hope that the book contributes to advance our knowledge on the application of economics to competition policy, a better design of law and of institutions, and to transatlantic convergence (inasmuch as this is efficient).


Competition and Regulation in the Spanish Gas and Electricity Markets
Giulio Federico and Xavier Vives with the collaboration of Natalia Fabra 

The aim of the report is to present an overview of key regulatory and market developments in the Spanish energy sector over the previous year. The report  provides an analytical summary of the main issues affecting the Spanish energy market, and seek to become reference reading for the academic, regulatory and business community with an interest in the market.


Advances in Industrial Economics, Game Theory and Finance
Xavier Vives, Alessandra Cillo, javier Gómez biscarri, Miguel Cantillo, Ángel López, Pedro Saffi, Victor Martínez de Albéniz, Giovanni Cespa and Giulio Federico

This project is composed of three subprojects. The first subproject (Industrial Economics) deals with competition and regulation issues in network industries (energy, telecommunications and two-sided markets).
The second subproject (Game Theory) focuses on the analysis of strategic complementarity in multi-stage games, the performance of simple decision-making heuristics in complex problems, a quantitative measurement of regret theory, and the analysis of the interaction between time and uncertainty in decision making.
The third subproject (Finance) focuses on: a welfare analysis of rational expectations equilibria in a competitive economy with asymmetric information, an out of sample test of the CAPM, short selling restrictions, how accounting standards affect models of return and risk factors, syndicate agreement contracts to sell corporate bonds, market microstructure and corporate governance, and how the recent financial sector turmoil has affected equity returns in banking institutions.



Past Projects


Regulatory Reform, Development and Distributive Concerns
Jordi Gual, Francesc Trillas and Gianandrea Staffiero

In the first part of the project, now under review  by the “Journal of Economic Surveys”, a review was made of the literature about “Regulation of network and redistribution companies in developing countries”, based on contributions by Laffont, Waddams-Price, Easterly and Servén, Kessides and Shirley, among others. For the second phase, an international team has been created with the aim of analyzing the effects of the liberalization of network markets, of competition in mobile phone network and of the companies productivity. Regulatory institutions in developing countries will also be studied.

Study on a Methodology for the Selection of Criteria for Priority Setting and Impact Assessment in the Anti-trust Field
Núria Mas and Jordi Gual

The main objective of this study is to develop a methodology that allows the European Commission to better target its administrative and human resources in the enforcement of Articles 81, 82 and 86 of the EC Treaty. Our goal is to develop a method for detecting in which industries anti-trust infringements (articles 81 and 82) are more likely to take place. Then we combine these probabilities of an infringement to occur with a ranking of the different anti-competitive practices according to their impact on consumer welfare.

Workers’ Pay Incentives in a Regulated Labor Market Environment
José E. Galdón Sánchez, Jordi Gual and Maia Güell

In this paper, a unique plant level data set is used to investigate how firms set workers’ pay incentives in a regulated labor market environment. In particular, we study the problem of setting incentives when firms are also facing union constraints. Our data comes from a survey of firms from Spain, which is probably the OECD country with the most regulated labor market. Moreover, we study to what extent optimal deviations from full incentives come from the imposition of wage floors by unions.

Liberalization in the Spanish Local Television Industry
Ricard Gil

The objective of this project is to theoretically and empirically investigate the impact of liberalization of competition and the deregulation of network structures on the degree of vertical integration and on pricing decisions in the local Spanish TV industry between 1996 and 2002. Specifically, we will analyze the effect of changes in competition and networks characteristics (membership and size) on the internal organization of the local television stations and their pricing decisions.

Academic Journals
Doh-Shin Jeon

These projects study some new issues raised by the change from print journals to electronic journals such as open access, interconnection among journal websites and bundling. This project will be three outputs:

• The Pricing of Academic Journals: A Two-sided Market Perspective
With Jean-Charles Rochet (University of Toulouse, France)

• Interconnection Among Academic Journal Websites and CrossRef
With Domenico Menicucci (University of Firenze, Italy)

• Bundling and Incentives to Introduce New Academic Journals
With Domenico Menicucci (University of Firenze, Italy)

A Simple Access Pricing Rule to Achieve the Ramsey Outcome in Two-Way Access
Doh-Shin Jeon

This project on the telecommunications industry provides a general approach to the issue of access pricing among interconnected networks and presents some novel results.

Models of competition in electrical sector
Xavier Vives
 
The research proposes to model the competition in generation in electrical sector by means of a model of strategic game in functions of offer in which the companies have privated information  about the costs of production (for example, the availability of their headquarters). There will be analyzed which is the number of companies necessary for a given level of competitiveness.

Analysis of the Effect of M&A Amongst US Hospitals for the Adoption of New Technologies
Núria Mas and Giovani Valentini

During the 1990s, the US healthcare market experienced a wave of hospital mergers that raised the average hospital Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) in health services areas from 0.19 to 0.26. The purpose of this study is twofold: first, to analyze the impact of such consolidation on the adoption of new medical technologies; second, to determine the effect that different hospital characteristics have on the different types of mergers.

Stochastic Market Sharing, Partial Communication and Collusion
Heiko Gerlach

This paper analyzes the role of communication between firms in an infinitely repeated Bertrand game in which firms receive an imperfect private signal of a common value i.i.d. demand shock. It is shown that firms can use stochastic, inter-temporal market sharing as a perfect substitute for communication in low demand states.

Competing Complements
Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Barry Nalebuff and David Yoffie.

Consider two strict complements, A and B: the bundle (A, B) is valuable, but neither A or B alone are of any value. We study competition between vertically differentiated manufacturers of A when there is a monopoly in B. The paper is motivated by competitive interactions between Intel, AMD and Microsoft, two semiconductor manufacturers and a monopolist supplier of operating systems.

Information Sharing: Economics and Antitrust
Xavier Vives

Firms may exchange information about current and past behavior, such as customer transaction data as well as cost and demand conditions. This paper will survey the incentives to share information and the welfare consequences in static (non-collusive) models, the analysis of the collusive potential of information exchange, the impact of information technology on transparency and unilateral and coordinated exercise of market power, and some competition policy implications.

Good governance of public companies and regulatory bodies
Xavier Vives

The project analyzes the best practices of good governance in public and regulatory bodies with the aim of giving recommendations on what measures should be taken to stimulate them.

Contracts, Entry and Communication
Heiko Gerlach

This paper analyzes the incentives of an innovative firm to announce entry when the incumbent can write long-term contracts with consumers. It investigates the impact of the entrant's information provision on the optimal contract proposal by the incumbent and show that the incentives to announce are highly non-linear in the innovation step size. From a social planner's point of view the incumbent introduces too high switching costs for consumers and there is too little announcement of big innovations. Consumers might be better off with higher switching cost and less announcements. In an extension it is shown that the entrant might be better off by announcing entry to the incumbent only and set the contracts terms collusively.

Determinants of Entry Modes Choice in Emerging Economies: Bargaining Between Host States and Investors in the Water Industry
Hugo Zarco-Jasso

In recent years, the functioning of public and private organizations has been subjected to ever increasing demands from society. Nowadays, private participation in infrastructure projects is referred to as public-private partnerships (PPPs). Emphasis is no longer on deciding whether to delegate some activities to the private sector, nor on discussing the advantages of large private firms versus public agencies. What are the determinants of entry modes as the outcome of bargaining between host countries and private investors? This is the question that we seek to address in this paper.