Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

Research lines:

• Economics of Network Industries
• Competition, Regulation and Industrial Policy
• Mechanism Design and Auctions
• Industry Studies: Telecommunications, Transportation, Utilities, and Services
• Management Control Systems
• Operations Management

 

Members:
Alessandro Avenali, Domenico Laise, Claudio Leporelli (leader), Giorgio Matteucci, Alberto Nastasi,  Pierfrancesco Reverberi.

 

PhD Students:
Tiziana D’Alfonso, Anna D’Annunzio.

 

Our research field includes general issues in industrial economics, with an emphasis on competition, regulation and investment in network industries. In particular, we analyze the following topics.

 

Regulation and competition in the telecommunication industry

We study the impact of access regulation on investment in a dynamic framework where developing an infrastructure requires both time and a captive customer base We define dynamic models to assess whether and when the ‘ladder of investment’ regulatory paradigm induces efficient competitive network investment. In this framework we analyze the credibility and dynamic consistency of multiperiod regulated access price schedules.

 

Regulation and competition in the pharmaceutical industry

We analyze the effects of different regimes of exhaustion of intellectual property rights on R&D firms' incentives to invest in product quality. National regulation gives rise to price differentials between countries that  induce international arbitrage (Parallel Trade). Manufacturers may counteract using vertical price-squeeze or non-price discrimination. Our findings dilute theoretical and policy concerns about the effects of arbitrage on welfare.

 

Auction-based market mechanisms

We study how scarce resources can be traded via auction mechanisms. We focus on combinatorial auctions, which enhance the efficiency of market exchanges in presence of goods complementarity or substitutability. We also explore extensions of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism in combinatorial auctions. We show how the VCG rule can be exploited to measure some impacts which the formation of a coalition of bidders may have on the auction performance.

 

Supply chain management

We study the role of the exchange of structured data across information systems within inter-organization business processes. We assume that data are exchanged under given condition of quality and prices. We describe a brokering algorithm for obtaining data from peers, by minimizing the overall cost under quality requirements constraints.

 

Multi-criteria managerial decision making

Our research illustrates the advantages of the multi-criteria methodology applied to managerial decision making problems. This methodology is founded on the notion of outranking to the benchmarking analysis of organizational learning capability.

Our future work will focus on the interplay among competition, regulation, and investment in Next Generation Access networks (NGA). Regulatory policies have an impact on investment incentives. Different competitive scenarios may arise as a consequence of technology choices and their impact on the scope for horizontal and vertical product differentiation. . In particular we will analyse:

i) the impact of the industry structure (vertical integration or separation) on investment incentives; we assess if vertical separation of the telecommunications incumbent may be an effective and proportionate remedy when the access network is an enduring economic bottleneck.

ii) How a dominant firm may use mixed bundling of complements to extend market power from a monopoly primary market to a competitive complementary market. Bundling denies scale and reduces incentives to invest in quality for rival firms. We asses if a price test for detecting anticompetitive uses of bundling may improve welfare with respect to the alternative cases when bundling is banned or can be freely practiced.

iii) The development of different public-private partnership (PPP) models to finance investment in NGA deployment.

 

Projects:
INTERAGRO - metodi e strumenti per la supply chain INTEgRata nell’AGRO alimentare
December 2005 – December 2009  -  MIUR FISR

ISBUL - Infrastrutture e Servizi a Banda Larga e Ultra Larga
January 2009 - June 2010  -  AGCOM - Autorità per le garanzie nelle comunicazioni

 

COLLECTIVE - Emerging communities for collective innovation: ICT Operational tool and supporting methodologies for SME Associations.
January 2010 – January 2013   -  EU FP7