Explore the vast range of titles available.

We develop and estimate a dynamic game of strategic firm expansion and contraction decisions to study the role of firm size in future profitability and market dominance. Modeling firm size is important because retail chain dynamics are more richly driven by expansion and contraction than de novo entry or permanent exit. Additionally, anticipated size spillovers may influence the strategies of forward-looking firms, making it difficult to analyze the effects of size without explicitly accounting for these in the expectations and, hence, decisions of firms. Expansion may also be profitable for some firms while detrimental for others. Thus, we explicitly model and allow for heterogeneity in the dynamic link between firm size and profits as well as potential for persistent brand effects through firm-specific unobservable factors. As a methodological contribution, we surmount the hurdle of estimating the model by extending a two-step procedure that circumvents solving the game. The first stage combines semiparametric conditional choice probability estimation with a particle filter to eliminate the serially correlated unobservable components. The second stage uses a forward simulation approach to estimate the payoff parameters. Data on Canadian hamburger chains from their inception in 1970 to 2005 provide evidence of firm-specific heterogeneity in brand effects, size spillovers, and persistence in profitability. This heterogeneous dynamic linkage shows how McDonald’s becomes dominant and other chains falter as they evolve, thus affecting market structure and industry concentration. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2814 . This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.

One of the novelties brought about by the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a strengthening of the concept of consent. For instance, although the freely given stipulation existed in the old framework—the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC—the changes introduced by the GDPR arguably imply that access to services may no longer depend on data subject consent. In reality however, data subjects often find themselves confronted with standard privacy policies and take-it-or-leave-it offers. Against this background, this Article aims to examine the alignment of the respective data protection and privacy, consumer protection, and competition law policy agendas through the lens of pre-formulated declarations of consent. The Article aims to delineate the role of each area with specific reference to the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, the Unfair Terms Directive, the Consumer Rights Directive, and the Digital Content Directive (Compromise), in addition to market dominance. Competition law analysis is explored vis-à-vis whether it could offer indicators of when a clear imbalance in controller-data subject relations may occur in the context of the requirement for consent to be freely given, as per its definition in the GDPR. This complements the data protection and consumer protection analysis which focuses on the specific reference to the Unfair Terms Directive in Recital 42 GDPR, stating that pre-formulated declarations of consent should not contain unfair terms.

Under Chinese anti-monopoly law, large platforms are forbidden to use exclusive contracts to prevent online shops from doing business with competing platforms. The alleged purpose of the law is to promote competition among the platforms, for it is widely believed that large platforms are able to eliminate competition with exclusive contracts and gain monopoly profits. However, we argue that exclusive contracts are probably used for protecting the investment of the platforms; that the platform, online shops and the competing platforms tend to allocate resources efficiently. If the exclusive contract is used inefficiently, the platform would bear extra costs and its economic strength and competitiveness would be weakened, and the exclusive contract will be difficult to sustain. It is unlikely that platforms with “market dominance” are able to use exclusive contracts to eliminate competition. Cursory banning of exclusive contract could put “freedom of contract” and private property rights at risk.

Within an existing organization, internal expertise, staffing, compensation, information systems, and market focus may complicate the introduction of new ideas while culture and aversion to risk may completely derail the organizations’ ability to innovate. The STAR model for corporate innovation provides a theoretical model on how to develop and execute innovative practices to overcome these obstacles and achieve significant market penetration and value. The model is a theoretical framework that empowers organizations of all sizes to construct the necessary structures and advocacy needed to create products, services, and internal processes that enable them to dominate the industry in which they participate. The model also provides the mechanism to support the identification, acceptance, and rapid deployment of relevant new technologies that offer an opportunity to create an unfair advantage, something that is very hard to replicate.

Although the Circular Economy (CE) has made remarkable technological progress by offering a wide range of alternative engineering solutions, an obstacle for its large-scale commercialization is nested in the adoption of those business and financial models that accurately depict the value generated from resource recovery. Recovering a resource from a waste matrix conserves natural reserves in situ by reducing demand for virgin resources, as well as conserving environmental carrying capacities by reducing waste discharges. The standard business model for resource recovery is Industrial Symbiosis (IS), where industries organize in clusters and allocate the process of waste matrices to achieve the recovery of a valuable resource at an optimal cost. Our work develops a coherent microeconomic architecture of Chemical Leasing (Ch.L.) contracts within the analytical framework of the Sherwood Plot (SP) for recovering a Value-Added Compound (VAC) from a wastewater matrix. The SP depicts the relationship between the VAC’s dilution in the wastewater matrix and its cost of recovery. ChL is engineered on the SP as a financial contract, motivating industrial synergies for delivering the VAC at the target dilution level at the market’s minimum cost and with mutual profits. In this context, we develop a ChL market typology where information completeness on which industry is most cost-efficient in recovering a VAC at every dilution level determines market dominance via a Kullback–Leibler Divergence (DKL) metric. In turn, we model how payoffs are allocated between industries via three ChL contract pricing systems, their profitability limits, and their fitting potential by market type. Finally, we discuss the emerging applications of ChL financial engineering in relation to three vital pillars of resource recovery and natural capital conservation.

In this paper, we analyze a recent antitrust case of abuse of dominance that was decided by a Chinese administrative enforcement agency under China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (“AML”). A key issue in this case involved the impact of loyalty rebate programs used by a dominant firm. We provide an overview of the case, highlight the main points of the decision, and focus on the assessment of loyalty rebates. As the first antitrust ruling in China involving loyalty discounts, we expect that the decision will serve as an important reference in antitrust enforcement in China.

This paper analyses the effect on retail fuel prices of factors such as belonging to dominant firms, the position of a local monopoly or oligopoly, and service station location. We study the effect of belonging to the dominant firms in the market, Repsol and Cepsa, of enjoying a local natural monopoly or oligopoly in rural areas, and of being located in places with captive demand, such as highways and motorways, as well as in the city centre. We apply this study to service stations in the province of Seville (Spain). The main findings are that the two main distributors, Repsol and Cepsa, set a higher price. We also find market power at a local level, which appears through monopoly or duopolies in rural areas, and which also results in higher prices, albeit to a much lesser degree. In addition, we see that stations servicing users on high-capacity roads as well as stations located in Seville city centre also set higher prices.

Chinese enterprises are presently dominating various sectors of businesses abroad, offering a wide range of low to high-end quality products and services. The construction sector in Africa is now being dominated by Chinese multinational contractor companies, who find in Africa their next preferable market to grow. The available literature on the field has serious gaps in explaining which organisational strategies increase the competitive advantage and the market dominance of Chinese multinational contractors, especially in the Southern African region. This research aims to uncover the organisational strategies, implemented by Chinese multinational contractors operating in the Southern African region, who have paved the way and consolidated their success in the region. Through a mixed methods process, qualitative and quantitative data are obtained. The construction markets of the Southern African region are analysed (environmental analysis) and the main multinational Chinese contractors are identified, through a literature review and organisational analysis. Several organisational strategies are shortlisted and, finally, through an online questionnaire, the opinions of the participants to rank the organisational strategies previously identified in terms of contribution to the actual success, copying capability, etc., are carried out. The findings revealed that the capability to offer a lower price for construction services, the easy access to loans and funds from the organisation's home government and the capability to trade debt for local resources, such as wood, land and minerals are the organisational strategies that mostly contributed to the recent Chinese contractor dominance in the Southern African construction market.

We design an asymmetric duopoly model with inherited market dominance such that the dominant firm and the smaller firm can price discriminate based on consumers’ purchase history. We show that uniform pricing softens competition leading to higher industry profits than under history-based pricing. Consumers benefit from history-based price discrimination unless the switching cost is sufficiently high and the inherited degree of dominance is sufficiently weak. A ban on history-based pricing would typically introduce a distributional conflict between consumers and producers. Finally, we establish that the gains to industry profits associated with uniform pricing exceed the associated losses to consumers.

In this article we introduce the abuse of dominance provisions in China's Anti-monopoly Law (AML) that was enacted in 2007, and we put this in context by briefly describing the laws on the abuse of dominance that existed before the AML, and their relationship with the provisions in the AML. We then discuss the interpretation and enforcement of the AML's abuse of dominance provisions, on the one hand generally in the context of China's new market competition environment and its political-legal system, and on the other hand specifically through a consideration of some recent antitrust cases on the abuse of market dominance. Finally, we offer a preliminary appraisal of the law and its enforcement.