With the decentralization of information and the democratization of expertise brought about by the growth of the Web, consumers now have access to a plethora of information on various aspects of their purchase process. This study seeks to examine whether such decentralized online information...

We discuss strategic ways that sellers can use tying and bundling with requirement conditions to extract consumer surplus. We analyze different types of tying and bundling creating (i) intra-product price discrimination; (ii) intra-consumer price discrimination; and (iii) inter-product price...

We study horizontal mergers on two-sided markets between horizontally differentiated platforms. We provide a theoretical analysis of the merger's price effect based on the amount of cost savings it generates, the behavior of outsider platforms, and the size of cross-group network effects. We...

As in most industries, in health care, information is a competitive asset, and we expect that health care providers may have incentive to protect their information from competitors. This study aims to understand how this incentive to protect information may be a barrier to the development of a...

In this paper, we examine how a seller sells a product/service with a positive consumption externality, and customers are uncertain about the product's/service's value. Because early adopters learn this value, we consider the customers' intrinsic signaling incentives and positive feedback...

A significant body of literature in information systems, marketing, and economics has shown the important implication of the distinction between experience products and search products ("product type") on consumer information search, marketplace design, and firm strategy. However, how to...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers and mobile-phone networks, offer plans with download limits: through one of two mechanisms, doing so causes the providers of the content consumer purchase to either reduce their prices or...

We explore the indirect network effect in the market for home video games. We examine the video game console makers' strategic choice between increasing demand by lowering console price and by encouraging the growth of software variety. We also explore the existence of an applications barrier to...

It is well known that the Internet has significantly reduced consumers' search costs online. But relatively little is known about how search costs affect consumer demand structure in online markets. In this paper, we identify the impact of search costs on firm competition and market structure by...

In this paper we analyze a model of usage pricing for digital products with discontinuous supply functions, which characterizes a number of information technology-based products and services for which variable increases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of "blocks" of computing or network...