STACKELBERG GAME, VERTICAL RELATIONS AND R&D INVESTMENTS: ARE THERE FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGES?

This paper studies a Stackelberg game among the downstream firms in a vertical industry where one-way R&D spillovers occur, from the leader to the follower. When the upstream market is perfectly competitive under certain conditions the standard first-mover advantages disappear. When we move to the upstream monopolistic case we find that despite the existence of spillovers in most of the cases, the leader gets higher profits and thus first-mover advantages are reinstated due to the price setting behavior of the upstream firm. It therefore challenges to some extent the “naive” idea that under one-way spillovers there are no incentives for early movers.

Upstream Bundling and Leverage of Market Power

We present a novel rationale for bundling in vertical relations. In many markets, upstream firms compete to be in the best downstream slots (e.g., the best shelf in a retail store or the default application on a platform). If a multiproduct upstream firm faces competition for a subset of its products, we show that tying the monopolised product with the competitive ones can reduce upstream rivals’ willingness to offer slotting fees to retailers. This strategy does not rely on entry deterrence and can be achieved through contractual or even virtual tying. The model is particularly relevant to the Google-Android case.

The poverty of manner categories in motion verbs coding vertical relations. Evidence from Polish and Russian

The article discusses the ways in which lexicalization of vertical motion takes place in two satellite-framed languages: Polish and Russian. In this typological category the manner of motion is typically rendered by the verb. The analysis of the descriptions of motion events by native speakers of these two genetically related languages shows that the lexicalization pattern of vertical motion differs from the horizontal one. First of all, when describing vertical relations, respondents less frequently code the manner of motion in the verb than when talking about motion along the horizontal plane. What is more, the results show that both Russian and Polish respondents use more motion verbs to describe vertical than horizontal relations, which points to the natural human tendency to code novel situations.

Domains of Law: Private, Public, and Criminal Law

This chapter considers the three major domains in law and the study of law: private, public, and criminal law. These domains have their own principles, vocabularies, and structures, each geared to the type of relationships they aim to regulate and constitute. This chapter first explains how these domains differ based on a set of conceptual distinctions, such as absolute and relative rights, legal subjects and legal objects, mandatory and default law. After describing law as a unity of primary and secondary rules and their underlying principles (in chapter 2), this chapter describes law as a system of legal relations between legal subjects, with regard to legal objects. This understanding provides the foundations for the introduction of the core structure, vocabulary, and underlying principles of each domain, highlighting the difference between supposedly horizontal relations in private law and the vertical relations of public and criminal law. This, for instance, connects with the prominence of the legality principle in constitutional, administrative, and criminal law, whereas individual autonomy, fairness, and societal trust inform the rules and principles of private law.