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Social media networks make their services freely available to all users. Users pay for the service received with the time and attention taken by the advertisements. This chapter argues that social media platforms are a unique form of monopoly driven by “the more the merrier” effect (i.e., network effects) in users' consumption. These monopolies exercise market power, not by charging higher prices to users but by “tying” larger amounts of advertising to their content. Traditional antitrust instruments designed to address excessive pricing and reduced output by monopolies need to be reframed to tame the attention economy problems in the social media industry. This chapter discusses five antitrust instruments grouped in three categories: structural, behavioral, and market-based remedies. Market-based solutions are the least explored in the literature, despite being the most promising instruments to lower the attention costs imposed on users, while preserving the economies of scope in production and the network effects in consumption, and possibly maintaining free access to social media, as we know it today.

This paper aims to consider the effects of a merger on technology adoption and welfare in the presence of passive cross ownership. Merger increases investments in process technology and may increase welfare. The results are important for antitrust policies and suggest that the antitrust authorities may not need to be too concerned about mergers in industries with cross ownership.

Game-theoretic analysis.

Merger increases investments in process technology and may increase welfare.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is original.

Here we consider the various ways in which airlines integrate their business activities. The thin markets, long distances, poor infrastructure, and challenging terrain over which many airlines based in developing countries operate can make it difficult to reap the economies of scale, scope, and density that carriers in more developed nations enjoy. There also remain institutional barriers to cross border trade in airline services. As a response to this, airlines from developing regions “cooperate” in a number of ways. This may involve multinational ownership, code sharing, or joint ventures. The rationale for these actions, together with discussion of the outcomes of some of them, is considered here.

The attempt to establish a common European framework for core platforms' duties and responsibilities toward other actors in the digital environment is at the core of the recent scholarly debate surrounding the Digital Markets Act (DMA) proposal. In particular, the everlasting juxtaposition between the “data power” – as emerging from recent cases (Section 2) – that dominant tech companies enjoy and the concept of consumer sovereignty (Section 3) lies at the core of the proposal's attempt to identify digital core platforms as market gatekeepers. Accordingly, this chapter critically investigates the divide between power imbalance and consumer sovereignty in light of the architecture designed by the DMA, with a specific focus on its effectiveness in identifying gatekeepers' power drivers (Section 4). After highlighting the main critical aspects of the pertinent rules, opportunities for fruitful developments are then identified through the reframing of some of the notions considered in the proposal, and namely the role of “lock-in” effects and “data accumulation” (Section 5). Lastly, this chapter suggests that the DMA advancements – while desirable – are bound to be fragmentary in the absence of a wider appraisal of the nature of data power imbalance dynamics in the modern digital markets (Section 6).