This paper empirically analyzes how the use of vertical price restraints has impacted retail prices in the market for e-books. In 2010 five of the six largest publishers simultaneously adopted the agency model of book sales, allowing them to directly set retail prices. This led the Department of...

The Internet has made consumer search much easier with consequences for competition, industry structure and product offerings. We explore these consequences in a rich but tractable model that allows for strategic design choices. We find a polarized market structure, where some firms choose...

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...

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...

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...

This paper quantifies the effect of state privacy regulation on the diffusion of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). EMR allow medical providers to store and exchange patient information using computers rather than paper records. Hospitals may be more likely to adopt EMR if they can reassure...

How do firms respond to entry in multi-sided markets? We address this question by studying the impact of Craigslist, a website providing classified-advertising services, on local US newspapers. We exploit temporal and geographical variation in Craigslist’s entry to show that newspapers with...

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...

Paid placement, where advertisers bid payments to a search engine to have their products appear next to keyword search results, has emerged as a predominant form of advertising on the Internet. This paper studies a product-differentiation model where consumers are initially uncertain about the...