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An ecosystem comprises all downstream products that employ a certain upstream input. In many cases, final consumers make irreversible investments to join an ecosystem before downstream prices are set. By committing to buy products that use the specific ecosystem input, they are at risk of being held‐up. Unable to observe future prices, consumers base their decisions on what they observe about the market structure within each ecosystem, including vertical contracts signed by the upstream firms. By entering into vertical agreements with multiple competing downstream firms, thus creating a credible expectation of lower prices, an upstream firm is able to mitigate consumers' hold‐up problem and, as a result, increase ecosystem demand. Our main observation is that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, an upstream monopolist merging with one of its downstream affiliates will find it profitable to continue to serve downstream competitors, even when products sold downstream are homogeneous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chromosomal instability is a hallmark of colorectal carcinogenesis and produces an accumulation of different forms of aneuploidies or broad copy number aberrations. Colorectal cancer is characterized by gain-type broad copy number aberrations, specifically in Chr20, Chr8q, Chr13 and Chr7, but their roles and mechanisms in cancer progression are not fully understood. It has been suggested that broad copy number gains might contribute to tumor development through the so-called caricature transcriptomic effect. We intend to investigate the impact of broad copy number gains on long non-coding RNAs' expression in colorectal cancer, given their well-known role in oncogenesis. The influence of such chromosomal aberrations on lncRNAs' transcriptome profile was investigated by SNP and transcriptome arrays in our series of colorectal cancer samples and cell lines. The correlation between aneuploidies and transcriptomic profiles led us to obtain a class of Over-UpT lncRNAs, which are transcripts upregulated in CRC and further overexpressed in colon tumors bearing specific chromosomal aberrations. The identified lncRNAs can contribute to a wide interaction network to establish the cancer driving effect of gain-type aneuploidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a theory of monopoly protection by means of entry in adjacent markets that have a common customer base (i.e. envelopment). A firm dominant in its market enters a data-rich secondary market and engages in predatory pricing and privacy-policy tying. We define the latter as conditioning service provision to the subscription of a privacy policy that allows bundling of user data across all sources. Acquiring data from the secondary market confers an advantage in the data-intensive primary market that shields the dominant firm from entry, thus harming consumers. We discuss potential remedies, including data unbundling and portability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]