Traditional business models of credit rating agencies (CRAs) are criticized for creating incentives for misreporting. This paper investigates a potential alternative in which CRAs receive revenue from advertisement only. We use a two-period Bayesian reputation model and show that CRAs will shirk...

A recent strand of the literature shows that the adoption of different lending technologies is associated with heterogeneous credit policies and performance. Using a unique Bank of Italy?s survey, specifically designed to capture some organizational features and the lending techniques adopted by...

Including the entry decision in a Bertrand model with imperfectly informed consumers, we introduce a trade-off at the level of social welfare. On the one hand, market transparency is beneficial when the number of firms is exogenously given. On the other, a higher degree of market transparency...

This paper highlights the strategic role of private quality standards in vertical relations. Considering two symmetric downstream firms that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of upstream firms, we show that there exist asymmetric equilibria in the downstream firms' quality...

We use a new dataset on the Swiss newspaper industry from 1999 to 2008 to estimate the substitution patterns between free newspapers and traditional media. Our identification strategy exploits the timing of free newspaper entry and allows for confounding trends. We find that the entry of free...

Using quarterly data of 58 countries, this paper provides empirical evidence that mobile phone diffusion from 2007 to 2009 is positively influenced by international network effects. Direct and indirect network effects are a result of the international standadization of telecommunication...

In Germany, the TV broadcasting of the Winter Olympics 2010 marked the official start of high definition television (HDTV). However, the transition from standard to high definition television has been significantly hampered by inconsistent change management. While the large international movie...

In this paper, we examine welfare implications of switching from a neutrality regime to a network management regime. While in the former a network provider or an integrated ISP should transmit data with a-bit-is-a-bit principle, in the latter it is allowed to differentiate its connection quality...

Two firms produce a product with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic that we call quality. The difference in the quality levels determines how the firms share the market. Consumers do not observe quality before purchase. Under non-comparative advertising a firm signals its own quality,...

The new European framework directive contains a number of policy objectives in the area of net neutrality. In support of these objectives, the universal service directive includes a transparency obligation for ISPs. This paper proposes a multi-stakeholder model for the implementation of this...