Past empirical literature provides strong evidence that competition increases when new firms enter a market. However, rarely have economists been able to examine how competition changes with the threat of entry. This paper uses the evolution of the zip code level market structure of...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc. demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...

Internet presumably reduces search cost driving price to the competitive level. Evidence from empirical research quantifying dispersion in the electronic based markets has yield mixed results. More recent research has documented near zero dispersion in the electronic markets using transaction...

Many technology studies have conceptualized transitions between technological generations as a series of S-curve performance improvements over time. Surprisingly, the interregnum between successive technological generations has received little attention. To understand what happens in the...

This paper develops and analyzes a model of competition between platforms in an industry with indirect network effects, with a specific focus on complementary product exclusivity. The objective is to understand the conditions under which complement exclusivity can be observed and analyze the...

We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users' propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users' online content generation activity has a causal effect on...

This paper provides a thorough analysis of oligopolistic markets with positive demand-side network externalities and perfect compatibility. The minimal structure imposed on the model primitives is such that industry output increases in a firm's rivals' total output as well as in the expected...

Motivated by policy makers' recent interest in reducing switching costs in various network industries to increase competition, this paper investigates how switching costs affect market outcome in such industries. The results show that the effects of switching costs on market concentration and...

Liberalization of the European automobile distribution system in 2002 limits the ability of manufacturers to impose vertical restraints, leading to a substantial restructuring of the industry and increasing the competitive pressure among dealers. We estimate an equilibrium model of profit...

This paper studies the role of firm heterogeneity and information spillovers in the sourcing decision to provide web services. To this end, we develop a theoretical model that relates these factors to firms' decisions to outsource or use in-house resources (insource). Based on this theoretical...