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DIW Discussion Papers 1734 / 2018
Assortment decisions are key strategic instruments for firms responding to local market conditions. We assess this claim by studying the effect of a national merger between two large Dutch supermarket chains on prices and on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in the merger’s effects, controlling for selection on ...
2018| Elena Argentesi, Paolo Buccirossi, Roberto Cervone, Tomaso Duso, Alessia Marrazzo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1730 / 2018
Are there economies of scale to data in internet search? This paper is first to use real search engine query logs to empirically investigate how data drives the quality of internet search results. We find evidence that the quality of search results improve with more data on previous searches. Moreover, our results indicate that the type of data matters as well: personalized information is particularly ...
2018| Maximilian Schäfer, Geza Sapi, Szabolcs Lorincz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1713 / 2017
In advanced economies, state-owned enterprises play an important role in sectors of general interest such as energy and water supply. The conditions under which they operate have changed fundamentally since 1998, with new strategies required for firms to preserve market shares in the face of liberalisation and technological innovation. This paper investigates the productivity effect of three strategies ...
2017| Caroline Stiel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1691 / 2017
We empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the U.K. Our analysis suggests that the internet has displaced other media with greater news content (i.e., radio and newspapers), thereby decreasing voter turnout, most notably among less-educated and younger individuals. In turn, we find suggestive evidence ...
2017| Alessandro Gavazza, Mattia Nardotto, Tommaso Valletti
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DIW Discussion Papers 1685 / 2017
In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as its extra-high voltage network. We analyze the effect of these divestitures on German wholesale electricity ...
2017| Tomaso Duso, Florian Szücs, Veit Böckers
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DIW Discussion Papers 1681 / 2017
When consumers face a large number of alternatives, they tend to simplify the decision problem by reducing the number of available alternatives to a subset of relevant alternatives, i.e. a consideration set. Since consideration sets are typically unobserved, most studies in the demand literature have to assume a consideration model. If these consideration models are misspecified, the demand estimates ...
2017| Anna Lu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1680 / 2017
In retailing markets of storable goods, consumer behavior is typically characterized by stockpiling. While existing research has developed rich models for such strategic consumer behavior, little is known about how sellers should ideally respond to it. In this paper, we provide insights into how frequency and depth of promotions affect consumer purchases and seller revenues in the long run. We show ...
2017| Anna Lu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1674 / 2017
We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets, and how sectoral regulation influences these outcomes. For this purpose, we compile a new dataset on the European Commission’s (EC) and EU member states’ competition policy decisions, and combine it with firm- and sector-level data. We find that EC merger policy has a positive and robust impact ...
2017| Tomaso Duso, Jo Seldeslachts, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1664 / 2017
We present an ex-post analysis of the effects of GDF’s acquisition of Suez in 2006 created one of the world’s largest energy companies. We perform an econometric analysis, based on Difference-in-Difference techniques on the market for trading on the Zeebrugge gas hub in Belgium. Removing barriers to entry and facilitating access to the hub through ownership unbundling were an important part of the ...
2017| Elena Argentesi, Albert Banal-Estanol, Jo Seldeslachts, Meagan Andrews
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DIW Discussion Papers 1643 / 2017
In this article, we study judicial behavior at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). British judges in general, and British high court judges in particular, are perceived to be independent and isolated from political pressure and interference. Furthermore, these judges tend to show a particularly high rate of consensus. This has led many scholars to consider that, contrarily to what holds ...
2017| Sofia Amaral-Garcia, Nuno Garoupa