Leonardo Madio
Associate Professor in Economics · University of Padua
DSEA-SID Grant 2025, EUR 20,000, 2025-2028. Principal investigator: Leonardo Madio.
The project studies competition in digital markets with a focus on two questions that are central to current antitrust and regulatory debates. First, how can competition emerge when a digital platform acts as a bottleneck between providers and users, as in the case of app stores? Second, how should competition policy assess tying and bundling when a platform leverages a dominant core service into adjacent activities?
Related event: 3rd Padova IO Workshop.
The paper studies how horizontal mergers affect firms' incentives to invest in R&D and develop new products, comparing monopoly and 3-to-2 merger settings and tracing the implications for innovation and consumer surplus.
Forthcoming in International Journal of Industrial Organization.
Publication: journal page
The paper studies competition between integrated and third-party app stores, focusing on default advantages, developer fees, user adoption, and the conditions under which within-platform app-store competition can emerge.
Publication: link to the working paper version in PDF
Ongoing project on tying, foreclosure, and welfare in platform markets, directly connected to the grant's competition agenda.
Ongoing project on mergers, innovation, and the role of knowledge spillovers in shaping firms' incentives to invest and compete.