research

Accepted at Economics Letters

This paper studies horizontal mergers in a production network. I show that greater downstream centrality -- the extent to which other sectors rely, directly or indirectly, on a sector's output -- reduces the cost synergy required for a merger to be pro-competitive when final-demand elasticity exceeds the elasticity of substitution in production.

Presented at 2026 EARIE, 2026 Barcelona School of Economics Jamboree, 2025 Spanish Association of Law and Economics Meeting, 2025 Jornadas de Economía Industrial

Link to the paper

NET Institute Working Paper (soon)

Piracy is central to digital markets, where identical content can be accessed legally or through unauthorized channels. While easier piracy seems likely to intensify competition and lower prices, it also reduces profitability and discourages entry. We develop a circular-city model with free entry in which consumers jointly choose content and access mode. Stronger enforcement raises prices for a fixed number of firms but also attracts competitors. Prices rise with enforcement in less competitive markets but can follow an inverted U in more competitive markets, where entry eventually pushes prices down. Extensions show that piracy can also weaken competition and raise prices by attracting consumers most willing to switch between legal providers.

Presented at 2026 Jornadas de Economía Industrial

Link to the paper

Interoperability expands consumer choice and competition only if large platforms remain willing to connect. We model asymmetric service ecosystems that bargain over interoperability while competing for users. We find that, despite the value of network reach, a large platform may disconnect a smaller rival to recruit its users or, more surprisingly, to improve the transfer on a surviving link. Disconnection shifts users toward the surviving partner without changing its zero disagreement payoff, raising the incremental value of the retained link and the transfer to the large platform. The platform may therefore sever a positive-surplus link even though its operating profit falls. We show that narrowing the quality gap or reducing switching costs induces disconnection due to this bargaining motive. With strong substitution and intermediate network effects, these reforms benefit consumers under either fixed topology yet may trigger disconnection, reducing equilibrium consumer surplus and total welfare.

We study how the release of Aurora on X changed norms around the creation of unsafe images and affected their production. Starting from a small number of central nodes, we identified a network of Spanish football influencers whose activity was particularly high during the Champions League. We use an LLM to analyze the images shared within this network. Our preliminary findings show a temporary increase in controversial images, including images featuring authoritarian figures. We are also studying the effects on engagement and whether this increase was driven by previous producers of unsafe content or by creators whose content before the release was largely safe. The latter would indicate a shift in norms: the unexpected ability of an AI system to produce unsafe content made such images surprising and humorous, consistent with a “forbidden fruit” effect.