Tilburg Law and Economics Center

TILEC Club IO: Moritz Suppliet

Date: Time: 10:40 Location: ONLINE Meeting

10:45-11:45, ONLINE MEETING

Moritz Suppliet is an economic analyst in the Chief Economist Team of DG Competition of the European Commission where he works on the economic assessment of merger and antitrust cases investigated by DG Competition. Previously, Moritz studied at the University of Mannheim, obtained a PhD from the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, and spend more than two years as a post-doc researcher at the TILEC/Tilburg University.

Moritz research focuses on empirical industrial organization and health economics. My agenda includes parallel trade, advertising, and competition in pharmaceutical markets. He is working also on the economics of innovation, particularly, on patent pools, standard setting organizations, and patent litigation.

Today, Moritz is an affiliated researcher at the Department of Economics at the University of Tilburg and the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC).

Vertical Mergers in the Media Industry: The European Commission’s Economic Assessment in Telia/Bonnier Broadcasting

Vertical mergers can lead to competition concerns when the merging firms foreclose access to upstream input goods/services. The foreclosure can be partial, i.e. via higher prices, or total, i.e. monopolizing access to an input, and is expected to lead to a significant impediment of effective competition. The incentives and effects of total/partial foreclosures depend on the profitability of each strategy and can be quantified by the vertical arithmetic and the Nash bargaining models. The presentation discusses the two models by example of a merger in the TV distribution industry, Telia/Bonnier Broadcasting. Since linear TV distributors face increasing competition from virtual content aggregators and over-the-top distributors in the internet, e.g. Netflix, the industry has seen several (attempted) mergers between TV distributors and content providers, such as broadcasters, and providing examples of vertical integration.

*for more information, please contact TILEC