innovation

Killer Acquisitions and Beyond: Policy Effects on Innovation Strategies

This paper provides a theory of strategic innovation project choice by incumbents and start-ups which serves as a foundation for the analysis of acquisition policy. We show that prohibiting acquisitions has a weakly negative innovation effect. We …

Mechanisms of Common Ownership

Amazon Entry on Amazon Marketplace

We want to find out whether the concern of seller and consumer harm as a result of Amazon entry finds emprical support beyond anecdotal evidence provided by the media. To this end, we measure the predictors and effects of Amazon first-party retail entry on consumer and third-party merchant outcomes in the Home & Kitchen department of Germany’s Marketplace between 2016 and 2021. While the empirical setting presented challenges for estimating causal effects, our results are broadly inconsistent with systematic adverse effects of Amazon entry on Amazon Marketplace.