This paper investigates the scope of indirect network effects in the home video game industry. We argue that the increasing prevalence of non-exclusive software gives rise to indirect network effects that exist between users of competing and incompatible hardware platforms. This is because...

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...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising – where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results – is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique 6 month panel dataset 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...

An important issue in economics is how market structure affects prices. While the standard view is that competition lowers prices, Chen and Riordan (2006) argued that with product differentiation it is not exceptional for prices to be higher under duopoly than monopoly. This paper empirically...

In this article, we estimate the price elasticities of demand for subscription and consumer switching costs for mobile telephony. We use a panel of Portuguese consumer level data to estimate a series of multinomial and mixed logit models. The demand for subscription is elastic. Switching costs...

Finding information about privacy practices can be difficult: privacy policies often do not present this information in an accessible way. People typically do not know how or for what purpose their personal information, gathered online, will be used. When asked, people frequently express...

This paper develops a simple model that links the adoption of a productivity-enhancing technology to increased vertical integration and a less skilled workforce. We test the model’s key prediction using novel micro data on vehicle ownership patterns from the Economic Census during a period...