ICT Conference Munich

From 29 February until 2 March 2012 the international conference on "Management and Economics of ICT" took place in Munich. Out of the 141 submitted papers from 39 countries there have been 36 presentations in 9 selected sessions at the conference. We would like to thank all 121 participants for the active participation and many interesting discussions, especially the two keynote speakers and the scientific comittee. We hope to continue the excellent scientific exchange in the future and to read many good publications in the special issue of the International Journal of Industrial Organization.

New technologies widely spread throughout the economy. Information goods differ substantially from traditional goods, because marginal production cost is negligible and network externalities and complementarities exist. This has implications for firms and customers, market structures, public policy and economic growth. The goal of the conference is to bring together scholars and practitioners who approach the question of the interdependencies between information and communication technologies (ICT), innovation, strategy, regulation and growth from different angles. We invited papers on the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics:

Network Economics, Two-Sided Markets, E-Commerce, Price Discrimination, Versioning, Bundling, Dynamic Pricing, Advertising, Media and Online Content, Telecommunications, Net Neutrality, Regulation and Public Policy, Diffusion and Adoption of Knowledge and Innovations, Patents, Intellectual Property, Productivity and Growth at the Micro and Macro Level, Software and Internet Industries, ICT and Organizational Change, Outsourcing, Green ICT.

Ritu Agarwal (U Maryland) and Neil Gandal (U Tel Aviv) have confirmed as keynote speakers. On the first conference day, there was a policy panel bringing together practitioners, researchers and policy makers.

The members of the scientific committee of the conference are Mirco Draca (LSE CEP), JP Eggers (NYU Stern), Oliver Falck (Ifo Institute), Marco Giarratana (U Bocconi), Michal Grajek (ESMT), Hanna Halaburda (Harvard), Steffen Hörnig (U Nova de Lisboa), Tobias Kretschmer (LMU, Ifo Institute), Katja Seim (Wharton), Thomas Strobel (Ifo Institute), Catherine Tucker (MIT Sloan), Patrick Waelbroeck (TELECOM ParisTech) and Christine Zulehner (U Vienna).

We are very pleased to announce that the International Journal of Industrial Organization will publish a special issue edited by Pai-Ling Yin (MIT Sloan) and Tobias Kretschmer (LMU, Ifo Institute) on the topic following the conference. The special issue is open to papers presented at the conference as well as papers not presented at the conference.

A picture gallery and the presented papers of the first conference in 2010 can be viewed here.

The conference was supported by the LMU Management Alumni Network. It was founded in July 2003 by LMU alumni and currently consists of over 2,100 members, about 70 sponsors and more than 5,300 interested individuals in the extended network. The LMU Management Alumni Network makes an effort to connect alumni, current students, companies and sponsors among themselves and with the BWL faculty by means of various events and presentations. As a non-profit association, the network's goal is to fund the faculty and to support it ideally. Please find more information at http://www.bwl.alumni.uni-muenchen.de.

Local Organizing Committee

Tobias Kretschmer, Esther Almasdi, Christian Essling, Christian Peukert, ictcm@bwl.lmu.de