Essays on competition between fixed and mobile networks in the broadband industry and on scientific publications issued by innovative companies

Abstact 1 - Over the past few years, mobile broadband technologies and speeds have greatly increased in the European Union, reaching an ever larger share of broadband consumers. These changes have implications for broadband market competition. In the past, mobile services offered slow but mobile internet whereas fixed services offered faster but fixed internet. Fixed and mobile broad-band were therefore obviously complementary services. While mobile broadband speeds have significantly increased over the latest years, fixed broadband is remaining rather a fixed technol-ogy. Consequently, if mobile broadband becomes fast enough considering some consumers’ needs, we believe that the same consumers will choose to use only the mobile broadband tech-nology (who by itself offers high-speed and mobility) instead of both fixed and mobile broad-band technologies. As a result, we may observe an increasing trend towards fixed to mobile substitution. Our study investigates empirically this trend. More specifically, it analyzes the im-pact of mobile broadband technology evolution - through 4G adoption - on fixed to mobile sub-stitution in the 28 European countries from 2009 until 2015. The few studies examining this sub-ject show that fixed to mobile substitution exists although none of these studies analyze the evo-lution of this substitution. The results confirm a significant existence of a fixed to mobile substi-tution in the EU, and show that this substitution is more than doubled when a country adopts 4G. The growing competitive pressure from mobile operators also provides fixed operators with incentives to acquire – or merge with – mobile operators. This fact should be a concern for policy makers as it could have harmful consequences for competition and investment on the broad-band market.Abstract 2 - Whereas open science – i.e. publishing articles in scientific journals – had been largely studied on the academic side, there is still a need to explore the subject on the industry side. This study spe-cifically analyzes the role of academic institutions in firms’ scientific publications and uses a novel approach to explore the subject. Publications issued from collaborations with academic institutions are indeed differentiated from other publications. The first type of publications is considered as an indicator of firms’ collaborative activities with academic institutions whereas the second type of publications is considered as the result of firms’ strategies and/or firms’ capa-bilities to publish. This study provides evidence that industry publications are a valuable signal to attract academic partners. In addition, this study provides evidence that potential academic partners are more willing to team up with firms’ researchers who have proven their ability to achieve high-quality research/publications without the help of academic partners. Finally, the study provides evidence that past successful collaborations with academic partners lead the firm to reiterate such collaborations in the short term (2 years max.).Abstract 3 - The objective of this study is twofold. First, it provides further knowledge on the subject of prof-itability of industry science/publications as it is not clear yet whether industry sci-ence/publications are profitable to firms. Second, it considers the central role of academic part-ners in the profitability of firms’ scientific publications as previous empirical studies do not con-sider such role. To investigate the subject, we perform several regressions with firms profits as dependent variable. The results provide evidence that the publication of scientific articles is not a profitable activity in itself (as it was demonstrated in two previous studies). Collaborations with academic institutions are the real basis of profitable results; the production of scientific publica-tions is only one of the consequences of these collaborations. This study also shows that not all collaborations are profitable, only collaborations in high-tech sectors that lead to high-quality publications lead to larger profits. Indeed, in their quest for survival and profitability, companies competing in high-tech sectors often need the help of academic partners to exploit scientific knowledge. On average, a rise of about 7% in successful collaborations (leading to high-quality publications) raises the profit of high-tech firms by about 1%. -Abstract 4 - This chapter analyzes the factors influencing the quality of the output of I-A collaborations ap-proximated by the quality of the I-A co-publications. More specifically it analyzes two subjects that are typically complicated to study empirically because of a lack of available data: (1) it compares US and EU I-A partnerships and (2) it discusses if and how internet is a useful tool in I-A collaborations. The results empirically confirm that EU universities are less efficient partners than US universities when collaborating with the private sector. This study also demonstrates a much larger gap between EU and US academic partners in high-tech sectors. Finally, the results provide evidence that broadband is a useful tool for international I-A collaborations although broadband is less important in the success of I-A international collaborations in high-tech sectors compared to lower-tech sectors.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion