Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household-level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of...

Are home computers are an important input in the educational production function? To address this question, we conduct a field experiment involving the provision of free computers to schoolchildren for home use. Low-income children attending middle and high schools in 15 schools in California...

We study merger waves in vertically related industries where firms can engage in both vertical and horizontal mergers. Even though any individual merger would have been profitable, firms may refrain from merging for fear of negative impacts from other mergers. When they do merge, however, they...

Social broadcasting networks like Twitter in the U.S. and “Weibo” in China are transforming the way online word-of-mouth is disseminated and consumed in our society. We investigate whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales using publicly available Twitter data and common text mining...

This paper proposes to incorporate product customization in the Maskin and Riley (1984) nonlinear pricing model in order to capture major features of mobile service data. In particular, consumers are characterized by a two-dimensional type. One dimension is observed by the provider and...

We analyse a newspaper market where two editors compete for advertising as well as for readership. They first choose the political position of their newspaper, then set cover prices and advertising tariffs. We build on the work of Gabszewicz, Laussel and Sonnac (2001, 2002), whose model we take...

Traditionally, the value of a product has been assessed according to the direct revenues the product creates. However, products do not exist in isolation but rather influence one another's sales. Such influence is especially evident in eCommerce environments, where products are often presented...

New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the “installed-base” - has a causal effect on current adoption behavior. Estimation of...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

This paper studies a “market creating” firm that offers a matching environment, by charging an access fee, to a population of users who wish to form a match. We focus on an environment where users only observe a signal from their randomly assigned partner's type and the signal...