Luca BENNATI will defend his thesis on Tuesday 24th June at 10:00 AM (Auditorium 6, bâtiment TSE and also by zoom)
Title: Essays in Industrial Organization
Supervisors: Professors Bruno JULLIEN and Christian BONTEMPS
Memberships are:
- Bruno Jullien : supervisor, CNRS/TSE-R
- Christian Bontemps : Professor of Economics, ENAC/TSE-R Co supervisor
- Senay Sokullu : Associate professor in Economics, University of Bristol Rapporteure
- Hsin-Tien Tsai : Assistant professor, National University of Singapore Rapporteure
- Mathias Reynaert : Professor of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole Examinateur
- Daniel Ershov : Assistant professor, University College London Examinateur
Abstract :
First Chapter: Many e-commerce platforms are vertically integrated and compete directly with third-party (3P) sellers. This raises potential competition concerns, as platforms may leverage their market power in ways that harm 3P-sellers and consumers. To analyze the effects of vertical integration on competition and welfare, I build a structural model that captures both the pricing and the product offering decisions of the platform and 3P-sellers. Using data from Amazon, I estimate the model and examine the impact of a policy prohibiting Amazon from selling products on its own marketplace. The counterfactual analysis reveals that while the policy decreases consumer welfare by 18.6%, subsequent entry by other sellers recovers up to 4.4 percentage points of this loss.
Second Chapter: This paper addresses antitrust concerns arising from recent U.S. airline mergers by introducing a two-stage model to analyze airlines' strategic decisions post merger. In the first stage, airlines decide whether to offer direct flights between cities, modeled as an entry game at the origin-destination market level. The second stage examines price competition among airlines in markets with differentiated demand. Since the number of potential equilibria in the entry game is significantly smaller than previously thought, we are able to estimate the entry model using Maximum Likelihood estimation. This eliminates the need for simulation-based methods, whose numerical challenges are not well-documented in such applications. Using this framework, we simulate the potential outcomes of a merger between Spirit and Frontier Airlines, assessing its implications for competition and consumer welfare.
Thirst Chapter: Incentives to share data with other firms in the same market are analysed when data is quality enhancing. I analyse a setting with three symmetric firms offering differentiated products. Products' demand depend on the quantity of data, which is predetermined. I show that, while consumer surplus is maximized with full data sharing, market-driven incentives only lead to a second-best: two firms have an incentive to share data among each other, excluding the third firm from the "data pool". While this scenario improves consumers' welfare compared to no-sharing, it still has a lower benefit compared to full-sharing.
