SSES Annual Congress 2026

"Industrial Organization und Policy"
June 4-5, 2026
University of St. Gallen

Keynotes

Andrew Rhodes (Toulouse School of Economics)
"Digital Ecosystems and Data Regulation" joint with Jidong Zhou and Junjie Zhou
Thursday, June 4, 2026, 09:30 – 10:30

Andrew Rhodes (Toulouse School of Economics)

This keynote develops a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with multiple single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem can use data from one product to improve the quality of its other products. We use the framework to study three regulatory policies aimed at leveling the playing field. Restricting the ecosystem's cross-product data usage, or forcing it to share data with single-product firms, benefits those firms and induces them to innovate more. However, these policies also dampen the ecosystem's incentive to collect data and innovate, potentially raising prices. Consumers are better off only when single-product firms are sufficiently good at innovating. Facilitating data exchange between single-product firms via a data cooperative can backfire and harm them, because it induces the ecosystem to price more aggressively. For both the data-sharing and data-cooperative policies, there exist data-compensation schemes such that consumers are better off compared to no regulation.


Monika Schnitzer (LMU München)
"Antitrust and Innovation: Lessons from the AT&T Antitrust Cases"
Thursday, June 4, 2026, 13:15 – 14:15

Monika Schnitzer (LMU München)

This keynote examines the relationship between antitrust policy and innovation through the history of the three major antitrust cases against AT&T. As the dominant firm in twentieth-century U.S. telecommunications, AT&T combined exceptional innovative capacity with extensive control over essential infrastructure and market access. Drawing on the three landmark cases of 1913, 1956, and 1984, the presentation shows how different antitrust interventions shaped entry, technology diffusion, and innovative activity. The keynote argues that innovation depends fundamentally on the ability of new firms to enter, interconnect, and build on existing technologies. The broader policy implication is that competition policy is most conducive to innovation when it secures contestability and limits the exclusionary power of dominant firms.


Simon Lörtscher (University of Melbourne)
"Monopoly pricing revisited"
Friday, June 5, 2026, 10:30 – 11:30

Simon Lörtscher (University of Melbourne)

The exertion of market power is of long-standing interest to economics. It has obtained renewed salience in the digital age and with the recognition of its relevance in labor markets. We provide an overview of recent theoretical advances to monopoly and monopsony power based on the incomplete information approach (Loertscher and Muir, 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026), which is immune to the Lucas critique (Lucas, 1976). We will show that underpricing and rationing can be optimal for a monopolist even if that practice induces resale in which the monopolist has no stake, with no bound on the ratio of resale to initial prices. We will also show that a monopsonist can find it optimal to use an efficiency wage and induce involuntary unemployment. The approach thus formalizes the Marxian notion of a reserve army of the unemployed (Marx, 1867). If involuntary unemployment is optimal under laissez-faire, then a binding minimum wage can increase total employment and workers’ pay while eliminating involuntary unemployment. Opaquely priced, conflated products that leave rational, risk-neutral consumers in the dark as to what they have purchased until after the purchase can be part of a monopolist’s optimal selling procedure. The merger of single-product monopolies whose markets do not overlap into a multi-product monopoly can harm consumers. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for and open issues related to Ramsey regulation and competition policy that arise from the incomplete information approach.