Giuseppe D'Amico

PhD Programme: Economics and Business 
Research group: GRODE – Grup de Recerca en Organització i Decisió Econòmica
Supervisors: Ricardo Flores Fillol & Bernd Theilen

Bio

Giuseppe D'Amico holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics and a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Tor Vergata, Roma. He started his PhD in November 2017 and has developed an interest in the connection between IO themes and behavioural economics during his academic career. Throughout his thesis, he analyzes the organizational structure of the platform-based industries and emphasizes the mechanisms underlying the platforms' management of the vertical relationships between buyers and sellers. In the last chapter, he challenges the issue of the use of customer data to set personalized prices by proposing a novel theory.

Project: Platform economics in vertically-related structures

In the last decade, the rise and expansion of the platform economy have represented a new economic revolution. Helped by digitization, this new form of organizing the economy has changed the overall Industry Architecture by renovating the whole value-creation process, which has passed from vertical-chain structures to more horizontal ecosystems. Companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are clear examples of this disruptive change. Rochet & Tirole (2003) in their seminal work state that "many if not most markets with network externalities are two-sided". Indeed, the benefit that a user derives when signing in to a social network, downloading a mobile app (such as Spotify, Tripadvisor or Airbnb) or, more generally, joining a network depends on the number and the quality of the possible interactions with the other network-users. Multi-sided platforms, thus, have the crucial role of facilitating, improving and, to some extent, regulating such interactions. The thesis uses a game-theoretical approach and aims to study the existing vertical relations among the platforms and their ecosystems. Although each chapter focuses on a specific industry, the findings are general and apply to several economic sectors.

Open Access publications

• Giuseppe D'Amico, Platform competition and consumer foresight: The case of airports, Economics of Transportation, Volume 29, 2022, 100248, View full-text
• PHD THESIS: Platform Economics in Vertically-Related Structures

Outreach activities

• European Researchers’ Night 2020: “Descobrint el bé comú”.

International secondment

• Sauder Business School, University of British Columbia. 4 months (2019).