Net neutrality is a hotly debated topic. A key point is the treatment of the data by internet providers: as users are a¤ected by the waiting times of data delivery, internet providers have an incentive to o¤er content providers di¤erent priorities. Net neutrality regulation does not allow prioritization. We study the e¤ect of regulation on the incentives to innovate of content and service providers. In the short run, regulation increases content provision at the edge by a fringe, while it decreases the number of applications of a large provider. In the long run, the internet provider adjusts capacity to maintain constant the average waiting time. Regulation leads to lower supply of capacity and overall content, although it fosters entry of new content providers.JEL code: D4, L12, L4, L43, L51, L52.

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production cooperatives in the periods 2003-2010 and 1994-2011 and we contrast co-ops behavior with the overall trend in the industries in which they operate. Our sample's evidence suggests that the cooperative's behavior has a stabilizing effect on employment with respect to shocks in output demand. Unlike profit-maximizers, cooperative firms seem to be adjusting pay more than employment when facing shocks. Production co-ops look better equipped than their profitmaximizing counterparts in tackling the long recession also because they have been very cautious in their profit policies over time. Unlike conventional firms, they have significantly increased their own equity during "good" years instead of distributing large dividends to their members. We are grateful to

There is no place like England to witness the role of pubs as a social networking hotspot. Social networks lie at the foundations of most of the social and economic interactions of individuals. The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of pubs as natural locations for the development of social networks and how their presence affects the socio-economic activity of a given area or region. The econometric analysis conducted on rural parishes in Cumbria, a peripheral county in Northern England, reveals that village pubs have a positive influence on the socio-economic activity of local communities.village pubs, rural communities, socio-economic activity,

Behaviour-based price discrimination (BBPD) is typically analysed in a framework characterised by perfectly inelastic demand. This paper provides a …rst assessment of the role of demand elasticity on the pro…t, consumer and welfare e¤ects of BBPD. We show that the demand expansion e¤ect, that is obviously overlooked by the standard framework with unit demand, plays a relevant role. In comparison to uniform pricing, we show that …rms are worse o¤ under BBPD, however, as demand elasticity increases the negative impact of BBPD on pro…ts gets smaller. Despite a possible slight increase in the average prices charged over the two periods in comparison to uniform pricing, we show that BBPD boosts consumer surplus and that this bene…t is independent of elasticity. In contrast to the welfare results derived under the unit demand assumption, where BBPD is always bad for welfare, the paper shows that BBPD can be welfare enhancing if demand elasticity is su¢ ciently high.

We investigate how cooperative firms reacted to the current crisis. This allows us to compare the behavior of cooperative and conventional firms facing exogenous shifts in demand. After a short survey of a stream of theoretical literature, we analyze a large group of Italian production cooperatives in the periods 2003-2010 and 1994-2011 and we contrast co-ops behavior with the overall trend in the industries in which they operate. Our sample's evidence suggests that the cooperative's behavior has a stabilizing effect on employment with respect to shocks in output demand. Unlike profit-maximizers, cooperative firms seem to be adjusting pay more than employment when facing shocks. Production co-ops look better equipped than their profitmaximizing counterparts in tackling the long recession also because they have been very cautious in their profit policies over time. Unlike conventional firms, they have significantly increased their own equity during "good" years instead of distributing large dividends to their members. We are grateful to

This paper analyses the dynamics of hotel prices listed on Booking.com in the period 2014-16. This period is characterised by the most important antitrust decisions regarding the use of price parity clauses by online travel agencies (OTAs) in the EU. First, we document the dynamics of hotel prices on Booking.com in tourism regions of three EU member states: France, Italy, and Spain. The evidence suggests that prices decreased in 2015, the year in which the major antitrust decisions took place, whereas they bounced back in 2016. Second, we provide both a comprehensive explanation of the previous evidence and a rationalisation based on a theoretical model of the OTAs sector. Overall, our overarching analysis of the price dynamics on Booking.com allows to explain both the impact of removing price parities and the possible response of the OTAs.

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Data brokers collect, manage, and sell customer data. We propose a simple model, in which data brokers sell data to downstream firms. We characterise the optimal strategy of data brokers and highlight the role played by the data structure for co-opetition. If data are "sub-additive", with the combined value lower than the sum of the values of the two datasets, data brokers share data and sell them jointly. When data are "additive" or "supra-additive", with the combined value equal to or greater than the sum of the two datasets, data brokers compete. Results are robust to several extensions.