POUYET Jerome

We analyze vertical integration between platforms providing operating systems to manufacturers of devices in presence of indirect network effects between buyers of devices and developers of applications. Vertical integration creates market power over non-integrated manufacturers and application developers. That market power provides the merged entity with the ability to coordinate pricing decisions across both sides of the market, which allows to better internalize network effects. Vertical integration does not systematically lead to foreclosure and can benefit all parties, even in the absence of efficiency gains. Its competitive impact depends on the strength and the structure of indirect network effects.

An incumbent seller contracts with a buyer and faces the threat of entry. The contract stipulates a price and a penalty for breach if the buyer later switches to the entrant. Sellers are heterogenous in terms of the gross surplus they provide to the buyer. The buyer is privately informed on her valuation for the incumbent's service. Asymmetric information makes the incumbent favor entry as it helps screening buyers. When the entrant has some bargaining power vis-à-vis the buyer and keeps a share of the gains from entry, the incumbent instead wants to reduce entry. The compounding effect of these two forces may lead to either excessive entry or foreclosure, and possibly to a fixed rebate for exclusivity given to all buyers.

Modern airports provide commercial services to passengers in addition to aeronautical services to airlines. We analyze how the airport's market power impacts the pricing of services when the airport also invests in the quality of its infrastructure. There is a need to regulate the airport and the optimal regulation can be implemented with a price-cap and a subsidy scheme targeted to the investment. The choice between a single-till and a dual-till approach does change neither the optimal regulation nor its implementation. We also investigate the consequences on the optimal regulation of the nature of the airport-airline relationship and of the observability of investment.

This paper examines, under imperfect competition, the effect of a cap-and-trade system on industry profits and the interaction between cap-and-trade system and the evolution of the market structure, both depending on the type of abatement technologies used by firms. Two extreme types are considered: end-of-pipe abatement technology-meaning, filtration and other mechanisms that are largely independent of production decisionsand process-integrated technology, which entails integrating cleaner or more energy-efficient methods into production. This paper prescribes that the distribution of free allocation should depend on the kind of abatement technologies. Finally, a reserve of pollution permits for new entrants is justified when the industry uses a process-integrated abatement technology, while a system with a preemption right may be justified in the case of end-of-pipe abatement technology.

We study the welfare impact of revenue management, a practice which is widely spread in the transport industry, but whose impact on consumer surplus remains unclear. We develop a theoretical model of revenue management allowing for heterogeneity in product characteristics, capacity constraints, consumer preferences, and probabilities of arrival. We also introduce dynamic competition between revenue managers. We solve this model computationally and recover the optimal pricing strategies. We find that revenue management is generally welfare enhancing as it raises the number of sales.

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A monopoly seller advising buyers about which of two goods fits their needs may be tempted to recommend the higher margin good. For the seller to collect information about a buyer’s needs and provide truthful advice, the profits from selling both goods must be similar enough, i.e., within an implementability cone. The optimal regulation controls pricing distortions and information‐collection incentives separately via price regulation and fixed rewards respectively. This no longer holds when the seller has private information about costs as both problems interact. We study whether competition and the threat by buyers to switch sellers can substitute for regulation.

We develop a model of vertical merger waves and use it to study the optimal merger policy. As a merger wave can result in partial foreclosure, it can be optimal to ban a vertical merger that eliminates the last unintegrated upstream firm. Such a merger is more likely to worsen market performance when the number of downstream firms is large relative to the number of upstream firms,.

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A concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. A “virtual Hotelling rule” describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along the optimal extraction path. Fields which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow different extraction paths. Resource might be left unexploited in the long run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contract may sometimes be implemented through royalties and license fees. With a market of concessionaires, asymmetric information leads to a “virtual Herfindahl principle” and to another form of heterogeneity across active concessionaires.

Based on the modern theory of regulation, the analysis aims to characterize the effective economic regulation of the French railway industry. The methodology consists in econometrically testing various scenarios of regulation and determining which of these best fits the data. Using aggregate data on the overall passenger traffic for the incumbent French rail operator (RO), SNCF, the two behavioral hypotheses of reference which we consider –absence of regulation of the rail operator which acts as a pure monopoly, and price regulation of services supplied by the RO– are both statistically significant and do not subtract from each other. This result is certainly related to the fact that passenger services include both high speed train services, for which the RO has some entrepreneurial freedom, and regional transport services, which are regulated by local authorities. In any case however, as the presence of unobservable efforts exerted by the RO to improve its productivity is statistically relevant, one concludes that the RO is not fully and properly regulated. This emphasizes that the design of policy reforms must account for the incentives they create on the RO. The analysis also shows that the most statistically significant scenarios are the ones in which the access tariff imposed by the infrastructure manager is such that the revenue generated by the access tariff is equal to the infrastructure spending. The pricing of the access to the infrastructure network therefore does not seem to be governed by economic principles, but more by budget considerations. While data limitations does neither allow to understand all the facets of a complex reality, nor to claim a high level of precision in the measure of all the parameters of interest, we believe however that we provide an objective methodology to characterize the optimal economic policies for the railway sector, in particular because it yields realistic estimates of the main structural parameters. Indeed the empirical results suggest that the railway industry as a whole exhibits increasing returns to scale, which incidentally is not compatible with the presence of multiple firms. In addition, the elasticity of demand for railway transport is relatively high, an indication of the competitive constraints this mode of transport faces from other transport modes or induced traffic.

We characterize the optimal contract for resource extraction in a context where the concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. The dynamics of extraction is characterized by a virtual Hotelling rule in which costs of extraction are replaced with virtual costs of extraction. We analyze how structural breaks in the price of resource impact the dynamics of extraction.

A firm must invest to provide a service to a public authority. The public authority can, once the private investment and the uncertainty about the value of the service have been realized, provide the service by its own means. While such intervention may improve ex post efficiency, it reduces the incentives to invest ex ante and social welfare. We study different modalities of intervention by the public authority (possibility to invest only, or possibility to negotiate with the firm under the threat of duplication of investment) depending on the information available to it. Our results suggest that allowing the public authority to negotiate with the firm improves welfare.

We characterize the optimal extraction path when a concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. Under asymmetric information, a `virtual Hotelling rule' describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along an optimal extraction path. In sharp contrast with the case of complete information, elds which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow dierent extraction paths. Some resource might be left unexploited in the long-run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contract may sometimes be implemented through royalties and license fees. With a market of concessionaires, asymmetric information leads to a `virtual Herndahl principle' and to a new form of heterogeneity across active concessionaires. Under asymmetric information, the market price converges faster to its long-run limit, exhibiting more stability.

We analyze early contracting when a seller has private information on the future gains from trade and the buyer can bypass. Despite ex-post trade occurring under complete information and being efficient, early negotiation with an informed seller allows the uninformed buyer to improve her bargaining position. We show that the buyer can divide seller's types so that bypass becomes a credible threat. While some sellers accept because they gain more than by trading ex-post, others accept only because they fear that rejection would reveal too much information. Equilibrium payoffs are characterized and are shown to have a close connection with ratifiable equilibrium payoffs.

This thesis uses the methods of behavioral economics to contribute to the study of intertemporal choice. First, the influence of present bias and consumer naivety on the market power of firms is studied. By giving more market power to firms, present-biased but sophisticated consumers allow firms to increase their profits. Under certain conditions, present bias can also increase social welfare. Individual naivety either does not change equilibrium profit or decreases it and systematically leads to a decrease in social welfare. Second, this thesis measures, through a laboratory experiment, the ability of individuals to anticipate their biases associated with intertemporal choices, the bias for the present or the bias for the future. The biases and their anticipation are measured from the choice of monetary allocations between two dates and the anticipation of these choices. The main result that emerges from this study is that individuals who are biased by the present or by the future tend to underestimate their bias. Finally, this thesis provides a theoretical explanation for the link between risk aversion and the screening decision. If the information is only instrumental, risk aversion increases the probability of screening. However, considering also the emotional value of the information, if the individual is highly averse to the information, if they value a negative emotional response relatively more than a positive one, the more risk averse they are and the less likely they are to choose screening.

We consider a market in which sellers can exert an information-gathering effort to advise buyers about which of two goods best fits their needs. Sellers may steer buyers towards the higher margin good. We show that for sellers to collect and reveal information, profits on both goods must be sufficiently close to each other, i.e., lie within an implementability cone, which competition or regulation may ensure. Instruments to do so vary with the context. Controlling market power while improving the quality of advice is more difficult when sellers have private information on the profitability of the goods.

We analyze the competitive impact of vertical integration between a platform and a manufacturer when platforms provide operating systems for devices sold by manufacturers to customers, and, customers care about the applications developed for the operating systems. Two-sided network effects between customers and developers create strategic substitutability between manufacturers' prices. When it brings efficiency gains, vertical integration increases consumer surplus, is not profitable when network effects are strong, and, benefits the non-integrated manufacturer. When developers bear a cost to make their applications available on a platform, manufacturers boost the participation of developers by affiliating with the same platform. This creates some market power for the integrated firm and vertical integration then harms consumers, is always profitable, and, leads to foreclosure. Introducing developer fees highlights that not only the level, but also the structure of indirect network effects matter for the competitive analysis.

Most countries in the world, and in particular in the European Union, have sought to increase the intensity of competition in the mobile telecommunications sector, a sector characterized by a very high rate of technological progress and by complex pricing. This thesis aims to assess the impact of this increase in competition on investments in mobile telecommunications networks, the price of communications services and, furthermore, how the intensity of competition can be measured in such a dynamic framework. Using rich databases on the characteristics of mobile network operators worldwide, their financial performance indicators and the characteristics of their offerings, this thesis shows that, under certain conditions, the predictions of static economic models may no longer be valid due to the high rate of technological progress in the mobile industry. In particular, it shows that: 1) as the intensity of competition, as measured by 1-Lerner, is higher than 62%, more competition is likely to lower social welfare due to lower investment. Thus, increasing the intensity of competition involves a trade-off between static and dynamic efficiency gains when the average operator's gross margin is less than 38% of its revenue. 2) the entry of a new mobile operator may reduce the price of services based on old technology at the expense of increasing the price of services based on new technology. The reverse is true in the case of a merger, suggesting that dynamic efficiencies outweigh static efficiencies in the mobile telecommunications sector. 3) The markup is likely to under/overestimate the market power of firms in highly innovative markets such as the telecom industry, where the effect of investment is highly uncertain. Empirical tests suggest that the magnitude of this bias increases with investment. However, this increase is not statistically significant.

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Under imperfect competition, the effect of a cap-and-trade system on indus- try profits depends on the type of abatement technology that is used by firms: industries that use process-integrated technologies are more affected than those using end-of-pipe abatement technologies. The interaction between environmental policy and the evolution of the market structure is then studied. In particular, a reserve of pollution permits for new entrants is justified when the industry uses a process-integrated abatement technology, while a system with a preemption right may be justified in the case of end-of-pipe abatement technology.

This thesis addresses some of the characteristics of regulatory and competition policies in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. Several ex-ante regulatory issues are addressed, dealing with investment in fixed telecommunication network infrastructure and the implementation of price squeeze tests by telecommunication regulators in Europe. The paper also examines various competition policy issues, such as the impact of tying products that create switching costs for users or the consideration of access terminals for the analysis of the e-book market under competition law. The impacts of sectoral regulation on competition policy are also analyzed, with an application to the definition and management by competition authorities of the practice of price squeeze in the network industries. Finally, this thesis puts into perspective different advantages and disadvantages of ex-ante and ex-post interventions, respectively by sectoral regulation and competition authorities.

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In December 2010, France approved the law "Nouvelle Organisation du Marché de l'Electricité" (or NOME law) to promote competition in the retail electricity market. In practice, the law allows retailers to buy nuclear production from the incumbent, at a regulated access price. This mechanism works up to a ceiling of 100 terawatt hours, which represents one quarter of the incumbent's production from nuclear plants. Each retailer is assigned a share of that amount proportionally to its portfolio of clients. We contribute to the debate raised by the NOME law regarding the evolution of retail market prices. We show that a price decrease results if the ceiling is sufficiently high compared to the market share of the retailers competing with the incumbent. This pro-competitive effect is stronger when the incumbent's rivals take into account the impact of their market strategy on the redistribution rule. Finally, we find that, if the regulated price of the NOME electricity is set above the nuclear cost, the incumbent realizes a gain that may result in strategic withholding, weakening the pro-competitive effects of the law.

The evolution of market structures, following the introduction of competition in industries initially qualified as natural monopolies and the globalization of activities, requires a modification of the institutions in charge of the regulation and supervision of these industries.