CISS offers young interested researchers within the fields of innovation and competition economics the possibility to intensively discuss their dissertation plan within a peer group of experienced and renowned scholars, other PhD students and post-doc researchers. Topics of the school are clustered around the key subjects "innovation" and "competition" as well as their interaction.
The schedule of CISS offers three types of sessions:
- Formal lectures in the morning giving a broad overview on specific research topics and current research in the particular fields.
- Workshops on research tools which will provide students with more hands-on methodologies, such as econometric applications (e.g. panel data, count data models, competition policy in two-sided markets, etc.).
- Student workshops offer young researchers the opportunity to discuss their PhD work together with juniors from the same field and faculty members. Participants will be assigned in different groups chaired by faculty discussants. The more informal character of these sessions (round table style) fosters interesting and lively discussions among participants.
Some Contemporary Challenges for Competition Policy (Pierre Fleckinger from Mines Paris – PSL & Paris School of Economics, France)
1) What is competition policy designed for?
A basic mind map of the challenges: the economy, from physical to digital; Environment; Digital; Competition policy; A synthetic picture of the economic system integrating both “external” challenges.
2) Competition and the environment
Stating the problem; Putting environmental concerns in competition policy?; Integrating competition criteria in environmental policy?; Dichotomizing the objectives?; Operational constraints imposed by competition policy; Hands-on discussion of a recent green subsidy design exercise.
3) Policy instruments for the digital economy
Why the digital economy needs a new policy paradigm; How to deal with ‘market power’ in the data market?; Selling digital content; An account of a case rebounding in France: the market for live TV rights.
Digital Platforms: Access to Information and the Need for Regulation (Imke Reimers from Cornell University, USA)
Digitization has led to a proliferation of products across markets, and digital platforms like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix have revolutionized how we access products and content. Digitization has also provided wide access to data and information, empowering consumers to make informed consumption decisions. Improved technology and data access have the potential to raise consumer surplus significantly, and this lecture will describe and quantify the ways in which pre-purchase information can help consumers.
Digital platforms have some control over how information is presented to consumers, including the order in which products are displayed in search results. Regulators, worried about platform bias, are scrutinizing digital platforms’ behavior, but they lack a clear understanding of such biases. The lecture will provide some definitions of platform bias and introduce ways to test for and measure its welfare consequences.
Production Function Estimation - Methods and Applications (Leonard Treuren from KU Leuven, Belgium)
This workshop provides an introduction to production functions estimation. The first part of the workshop will provide a brief overview of methods and challenges – with particular focus on developments since Olley and Pakes (1996). The second part of the workshop will discuss applications related to competition and innovation, such as assessing market power in input and output markets, and quantifying the relation between innovation and productivity.
The SearchEngine: a Holistic Approach to Matching (Thorsten Doherr from ZEW, Germany)
Being able to match large databases from different sources becomes more and more a required skill for empirical researchers as the low hanging fruits, meaning topics based on data from a single source, are often already harvested. Luckily, the additional effort not only opens opportunities for new but also deeper research. The main issue is the fact, that most data collectors have other things in mind than providing common keys for researchers. For example, a patent office does not collect VAT numbers for the applicants as these are not required for the legal status of the documents. Local administrations have to publish all EU funded projects on their webpages but do not provide links to firm level databases. Without a shared key, the match has to be based on mutual content, which usually is not harmonized. Whoever has tried to match by harmonization of firm address fields knows that this is a frustrating and time consuming procedure, especially for international data. This seminar empowers the participants to use a universal and free matching tool called SearchEngine. As the specific properties of every match are different and the quality of the result fundamentally depends on the customization of the SearchEngine, it also teaches the basics of the implemented heuristics and provides insights into the SearchEngine Machine Learning approach SEML to master matching projects of any scale.
Are M&As Good or Bad for Innovation? - New Empirical Methods for their Assessment (Jo Seldeslachts from KU Leuven, Belgium and DIW, Germany)
Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received little attention. This lecture surveys the existing literature on the impact of applied research institutions on innovation and presents new econometric evidence for the case of the Fraunhofer Society.
Machine Learning and Deep Learning Methods with Application to Collusion Detection (Jannis Kück from DICE, Germany)
Part 1 (75 min): Lecture on Machine Learning and Deep Learning (e.g. Penalized Linear Regression, Boosted Trees and Random Forest, Feed Forward Neural Nets and extensions)
Part 2 (90min): Tutorial on collusion detection (hands-on exercises in R using google colab)
Note: Please make sure you can log in to your Google account. If you prefer to work locally on your device, you can also use RStudio.
