The Center celebrated its official launch with a panel discussion on the “Challenges facing Competition Policy in Hong Kong and Asia.” Following Dean Kar Yan TAM’s welcoming remarks, Professor Albert Park, Director of CEP and Chair Professor of Economics, outlined the Center’s mission focuses on offering high-quality research insights into the effectiveness of economic policies and programs.

This paper proposes a new model of imperfect competition of ad-sponsored media, which can sell “free” products, for a merger analysis applicable to the mobile app industry. To analyze developers' monetizing with both price and advertising in an app, we consider a consumer who faces both budget and time constraints. Moreover, to catch up with newly created and quickly redefined markets, we automate the conversion from in-text product descriptions to numerical product attributes by combining word embedding and dimension reduction techniques.