Robert Somogyi's website
I work as an associate professor at the Finance Department of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary.
I completed my PhD in Economics at Ecole Polytechnique and CREST in 2016, after which I joined the CORE research center of Université catholique de Louvain for two years as a postdoctoral researcher.
My research interests are Microeconomic Theory, Industrial Organization of the Digital Economy, and Agent-based Computational Economics.
Email: somogyi.robert [at] gtk.bme.hu
Selected publications:
Deceptive Features on Platforms with Johannes Johnen, The Economic Journal, forthcoming.
Monopoly Pricing with Dual Capacity Constraints, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 2024.
Generative AI and Deceptive News Consumption with Luca Sandrini, Economics Letters, 2023.
Competition with Capacity Uncertainty - Feasting on Leftovers with Gábor Virág and Wouter Vergote,
Games and Economic Behavior, 2023.
Optimal Capacity Sharing for Global Genomic Surveillance with Zsombor Méder, 2023, Epidemics.
Prioritization vs Zero-rating: Discrimination on the Internet, with Axel Gautier, 2020, International Journal of Industrial Organization.
Bertrand-Edgeworth Competition with Substantial Horizontal Product Differentiation, 2020, Mathematical Social Sciences.
Work in progress:
News Media Bargaining Codes (with Luca Sandrini, NET Institute Working Paper 22-06, won a NET Institute Summer Grant.)
In this paper, we build a model of the news market where advertisers allocate their ads between a social media platform and a news website that is the content creator. Our main objective is to evaluate a policy intervention that aims to foster news creation by transferring revenues from social media to news websites. Such interventions, commonly referred to as news media bargaining codes, were first introduced in Australia in 2021 and are being implemented worldwide. We build on a novel trade-off between the higher advertising efficiency of social media and the value of content creation by news websites. News content creation exerts a positive externality both on consumers and the social media platform. However, the advertiser fails to fully internalize this externality, generally implying a socially sub-optimal level of news creation. When news quality is unaffected by the policy, we show that the policy intervention mandated by the bargaining code is always welfare-increasing as it results in additional news creation. When news quality is endogenous, we nuance our results by showing that a poorly designed transfer would not induce additional news creation. Notably, even such a transfer would not harm consumers. Finally, we also provide some guidance on how to design the policy.
Zero-rating and Net Neutrality (previous version appeared in CORE Discussion Papers, 2016/47, Université catholique de Louvain)
This paper studies zero-rating, an emerging business practice consisting in a mobile internet service provider (ISP) excluding the data generated by certain content providers (CPs) from its consumers’ monthly data cap. Being at odds with the principle of net neutrality, these arrangements have recently attracted regulatory scrutiny all over the word. I analyze zero-rating incentives of a monopolistic ISP facing a capacity constraint in a two-sided market where consumption provides utility for homogeneous consumers as well as advertising revenue for CPs. Focusing on a market with two CPs competing with each other and all other content which is never zero-rated, I identify parameter regions in which zero, one or two CPs are zero-rated. Surprisingly, the ISP may zero rate content when content is either very unattractive or very attractive for consumers, but not in the intermediary region. I show that zero-rating benefits consumers if content is attractive, whereas it may decrease social welfare in the case of unattractive content.
Competition with Dual Capacity Constraints
This paper studies duopoly pricing under dual capacity constraints, limiting both the total quantity and the number of consumers served. It extends both the analysis of monopoly pricing with dual capacity constraints and the symmetric models of Bertrand-Edgeworth competition with a single capacity. By isolating parameter regions where a symmetric pure-strategy equilibrium exists, I find that several types of equilibria are possible, depending on the model's specifications. For some of them, duopoly prices are identical to monopoly prices. Equilibrium prices are non-monotonic in capacity levels if consumers' valuations are sufficiently heterogeneous. Moreover, I show that despite their ability to price discriminate, competition may lead firms to charge identical prices across markets.