Northwest UK Industrial Organisation workshop

Join our two-day workshop and explore the recent developments in industrial organisation (IO) within the Northwest region.

Date: Monday and Tuesday 23-24 June 2025

Time: 10:00am-6:30pm (Monday) and 9am-4pm (Tuesday)

Place: University of Liverpool Management School - Seminar Room 1

The event

This inaugural workshop, "Northwest UK Industrial Organisation" will bring together leading researchers and industry experts in industrial organisation within the region to discuss the recent developments in the field.

The event includes plenary sessions, sessions with contributed papers and policy-related sessions and will cover various topics such as:

Digital ecosystems
Oligopoly
Sin taxes and advertising restrictions
The state of UK competition
Rise of discounters
Price coordination.

An excellent opportunity to learn and network, the workshop features keynote speakers from Toulouse School of Economics and Oxford University and presentations from Competition and Markets Authority.

Schedule

Monday 23 June

Time	Programme
10:00-10:30	Registration and welcome
10:30-11:30	Keynote 1 Professor Andrew Rhodes (Toulouse School of Economics) – “Digital Ecosystems and Data Regulation”
11:30-11:50	Coffee Break
11:50-13:10	Session 1 Professor Ricardo Ribeiro (Catolica Porto Business School) – “Estimating Oligopoly with Shareholder Voting Models” Dr Renaud Foucart (University of Lancaster) – “Endogenous Formation of Optimal Teams”
13:10-14:10	Lunch
14:10-15:30	Session 2 Dr Balazs Murakozy (University of Liverpool) – “How Chinese Import Competition Shapes the Quantity and Types of Innovation by European Firms” Dr Luciana Nicollier (University of Nottingham) – “Strategic Inefficiency in Investor-State Arbitration”
15:30-15:50	Coffee Break
15:50-17:10	Session 3 Professor Nicolas de Roos (University of Liverpool) – “Negotiating Price Coordination” Rajssa Mechelli (Competition and Markets Authority) – “The state of UK Competition”
17:10-17:30	Break
17:30-18:30	Keynote 2 Professor Howard Smith (Oxford University) – “The Rise of the Discounters and its Impact on Concentration, Market Power and Welfare”
19:30	Dinner - TBA (by invitation)

Tuesday 24 June

Time	Programme
9:00-10:20	Session 4 Professor Rachel Griffith (University of Manchester) – “The Effects of Sin Taxes and Advertising Restrictions in a Dynamic Equilibrium” Professor Dennis Rickert (Mines Paris - PSL University) – “Without Strong Retailers, Consumers Do Not Benefit from Higher Minimum Wages. Empirical Evidence from U.S. Grocery Retailing”
10:20-10:40	Coffee Break
10:40-12:00	Session 5 Dr David Rietzke (University of Lancaster) – “Innovation contest design with product and supplier diversity” Dr Christopher Wilson (University of Loughborough) – “Costly Participation and Default Allocations in All-Pay Contests”
12:00-13:00	Lunch
13:00-14:20	Session 6 Vasudha Wattal (University of Manchester) – “Too big to fail, too few to choose? Corporates, market concentration, and quality in England’s specialised care sector” Alan Crawford (Competition and Markets Authority) – “Vodafone/3 merger analysis”
14:20-14:40	Coffee Break
14:40-16:00	Session 7 Professor Chun Yi (University of Hunan) – “Collusive Price Floors and Bounded Rationality: Evidence from China’s Movie Industry” Samir Doshi (Competition and Markets Authority) – “Estimating geographical retail markets from card spending data”
16:00	Close