Working Papers
Vertical Integration and E-commerce Competition: Evidence from Amazon Marketplace (Job market paper)
Presentations: Compass Lexecon, ENTER Jamboree (2024), SIM Colloquium (2024), Ibeo Digital Economics Workshop (2024), CRESSE (2024), EARIE (2024), Jornadas de Economía Industrial (2024), EIEF-IGIER-UNIBO IO Worskshop (2024), BECCLE (2025).
Many e-commerce platforms are vertically integrated and compete directly with third-party (3P) sellers. This raises potential competition concerns, as platforms may leverage their market power in ways that harm 3P-sellers and consumers. To analyze the effects of vertical integration on competition and welfare, I build a structural model that captures both the pricing and the product offering decisions of the platform and 3P-sellers. Using data from Amazon, I estimate the model and examine the impact of a policy prohibiting Amazon from selling products on its own marketplace. The counterfactual analysis reveals that while the policy decreases consumer welfare by 19.3%, subsequent entry by other sellers recovers up to 4.5 percentage points of this loss.
Endogenous Entry and Airline Competition joint with Christian Bontemps and Andrea Gualini
This paper addresses antitrust concerns arising from recent U.S. airline mergers by introducing a two-stage model to analyze airlines' strategic decisions post-merger. In the first stage, airlines decide whether to offer direct flights between cities, modeled as an entry game at the origin-destination market level. The second stage examines price competition among airlines in markets with differentiated demand. Since the number of potential equilibria in the entry game is significantly smaller than previously thought, we are able to estimate the entry model using Maximum Likelihood estimation. This eliminates the need for simulation-based methods, whose numerical challenges are not well-documented in such applications. Using this framework, we simulate the potential outcomes of a merger between Spirit and Frontier Airlines, assessing its implications for competition and consumer welfare.