Massimo Motta (BSc Bocconi, Milan, 1987; PhD Louvain, 1991) is Research Professor at ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Barcelona GSE. He was Chief Economist at the European Commission in 2013-2016, where he coordinated the EC's economic analysis and advised the Competition Commissioner on antitrust, merger and state aid. He was previously professor at Univ. Bologna (2007-2010), European University Institute, Florence (1998-2008) and UPF (1992-1998). He is Research Fellow of CEPR, of CESifo, and a Fellow of the European Economic Association. His research is on industrial organization and has been published in the top international journals. Massimo's book on Competition Policy: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2004) is the standard reference on antitrust. His new (co-authored) book on Exclusionary Practices (Cambridge, 2018) has just been published.

Research interests

I have been working on practices - such as predation, rebates, exclusive contracts, tying, refusal to deal - that dominant firms may adopt to exclude rivals from the market. Building on original models, existing literature and case studies, the rationale and effects of such practices are studied in Exclusionary Practices, with C Fumagalli and C Calcagno (Cambridge, 2018). Related research with C Fumagalli investigates the incentives of a vertically integrated firm to refuse to deal with downstream rivals in markets which change over time. Another project (also with C Fumagalli) studies whether an incumbent firm's above-cost pricing may exclude less (or as-) efficient rivals in an anti-competitive way, and to what extent price-cost tests may be helpful. Another stream of work (with E Tarantino) deals with the effects of mergers on investment and innovation, a controversial issue in many high-profile merger cases.