Sonia Falconieri

Collective Versus Individual Sale of Television Rights in League Sports

In many countries, the collective sale of TV rights by sports leagues has been challenged by the antitrust authorities.In several cases, however, leagues won in court, on the ground that sport cannot be considered a standard good.In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which the sale of TV rights collectively by sports leagues, rather than individually by teams, is preferred from a social welfare viewpoint.We find that collective sale is socially preferable when leagues are small, relatively homogeneous in terms of clout and where teams get little performance-related revenues.

The Optimal Design of IPOs: Price vs Quantity Discrimination

This paper provides theoretical support to the use of the uniform pricing rule in the IPOs procedures. In particular, by using an optimal auction approach, we are able to fully characterize the optimal IPO mechanism in a very general informational environment. Our results show that: 1) the optimal IPO can be implemented through a uniform price across all the investors; 2) the optimal allocation rule is such that when the informed investors reveal too bad news, the seller awards the shares to the retail investors; 3) in case of an oversubscription of the issue, the rationing scheme is a linear translation of the optimal allocation rule, i.e. all investors are rationed by the same quantity of shares.

Single versus multiple banking: lessons from initial public offerings

A vast research in banking addresses the question of the costs and benefits of multiple bank relationships versus a single bank relationship. Although no clear-cutting conclusion is reached, several contributions suggest that multiple bank relationships might lead to a sub-optimal level of monitoring, compared to a single bank relationship, as a result of free riding and coordination problems. We take a novel approach to tackle this research question, by looking at the role, if any, played by the number of lending relationships in initial public offerings (IPOs). We look at the short-term performances of IPOs as measured by underpricing and find that firms that go public with multiple bank relationships exhibit more underpricing than those that go public with a single bank relationship. This finding is independent of the number of bank relationships and/or whether any of the lending banks also acts as underwriter in the offering. We interpret our results as suggesting that the market attributes a weaker certification role to multiple bank relationships because of their less effective monitoring of IPO firms.

Lobbying and the Optimality of Delegation: Learning from Political Institutions

This paper investigates the choice between delegation and centralization within political institutions in the presence of lobbying. Our legislature is composed of two bodies: the floor and an informational committee. The floor has the (formal) power to choose the policy to be implemented whereas the committee has the expertise to learn the payoff pattern of the feasible policies which is ex ante unknown. The floor also decides the allocation of the political authority by choosing between two alternative legislative rules: open versus closed rule. We show that, in presence of lobbying, the effectiveness of delegation (closed rule) as an incentive device towards the committee is noticeably reduced while the costs for the floor are higher. As a result, we show that, under some general conditions, centralization dominates delegation.