What drives self-regulation in the nascent P2P “ride-sharing” industry?

The American company Uber has been all over the news in Belgium over the last three weeks. Uber connects passengers …

How do comparison shopping sites make a living?

Comparison shopping sites, also known as shopping robots or shopbots, have been around for about two decades. Sites such …

Prezi: a successful freemium model?

Last year, I had to deliver a speech about the economics of Internet to a non-technical audience. To make …

Les plateformes MOOCs: menaces et opportunités pour l’enseignement universitaire

En quelques semaines seulement, l’Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) a vu près de 20.000 personnes s’inscrire à un de …

Can IPdigIT start a snowball effect?

In a previous post, I described the success story of Alex Tew who managed to raise $1 million for his …

Will the new Belgian Telecom Act lead to lower prices?

Since October 1st 2013, a new ” Telecom ” Act transposes into Belgian law a series of European directives to …

The smartphone patent wars: nothing really surprising…

(This is an updated and slightly modified version of this post, published on April 25, 2012.) In April 2012, …

Browser War: The Return

This is the fourth post adapted from term papers that my master students submitted in June 2013. This post …

Markets for technologies: do they really work?

It is widely agreed that one of the main economic roles of IP law is to create exclusive rights: exclusivity …

Why does Microsoft keep chasing Google’s taillights with Bing?

Four years ago, Microsoft released a new search engine: Bing. It was aimed to be an improved version of …