Descrizione del progetto
Uno sguardo più attento ai giganti del commercio elettronico
Le piattaforme online, quali Amazon, Alibaba e Google, sono diventati giganti del commercio elettronico e sono oggi una parte importante dell’economia digitale, che genera ricavi netti di miliardi di euro. La normativa europea sull’equità e la trasparenza nei rapporti piattaforma-business mette in atto un quadro armonizzato per la trasparenza minima necessaria e per ristabilire i diritti. Il progetto DIPVAR, finanziato dall’UE, approfondirà le raccomandazioni politiche efficaci per la politica della concorrenza nei mercati digitali in grado di migliorare in modo significativo il livello di benessere dei consumatori nell’UE. Svilupperà modelli di mercati con piattaforme digitali e implicazioni di revisione delle prassi commerciali delle piattaforme digitali su prezzi, fornitura di varietà e qualità agli acquirenti, piccoli concorrenti e sul potenziale ingresso di piattaforme. I risultati chiariranno le potenziali distorsioni in questi mercati enormemente redditizi.
Obiettivo
Digital platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google, have become important global players. Their practices have led to significant anti-trust and regulatory scrutiny, and interventions. The existing theoretical models are not suited for the analysis of most of digital platforms as they fail to capture their important aspects and dynamics. This project’s first goal is to develop tractable and applicable models of markets with digital platforms capturing their unique features. The second goal is to investigate the implications of digital platforms’ business practices on prices, variety and quality provision to buyers, on small rivals, and on potential platform entry. I plan to attain these goals via two work packages: WP1 will provide a tractable framework capturing important characteristics of online market places and can thus be used to analyze e-commerce platforms’ optimal seller contracts and the implied variety offered to consumers. After illustrating an equivalence between a trade platform and a multiproduct monopolist, WP1 will identify with which demand systems and information structure multiproduct firms under-/over-provide variety. Using equivalence conditions WP1 will study whether, how, and when the variety implied by platforms’ pricing diverges from the social optimality and which type of seller contracts could mitigate such distortions. WP2 will provide tractable and applicable models to study competition between asymmetric platforms to attract high quality sellers. WP2 will analyze how platforms’ restrictions on users multi-homing (participating in multiple platforms) and restrictions on switching behavior of users affect market allocation, quality provision, prices, entry and dynamics. The findings of this project will highlight potential distortions in these multi-billion markets and ultimately suggest effective policy recommendations for competition policy in digital markets, which can greatly improve consumer welfare in the EU.
Parole chiave
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
50014 Fiesole
Italia