While some broadband providers have called Internet content and application providers free riders on their infrastructure, this is incorrect and misguided. End-users pay for their residential broadband providers for access to the Internet, and content providers pay their own ISPs for...

We examine the intersection of patents and antitrust where a patent holder uses the monopoly power it possesses in the market for a patented product to exclude competitors in an adjacent market and attempt to monopolize or monopolize the adjacent market. The present scheme for awarding patents...

This paper proposes a revealed preference test of network formation models. Specifically, I consider network formation models where agents are (1) strategic, (2) externalities are confined to within an agent's k-neighborhood, where k can be varied. I show that this model can be tested using...

Many firms have introduced internet-based customer self-service applications, such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial signup rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multi-stage nature of the adoption process (an...

The US mobile phone industry has dramatically consolidated through mergers. We investigate whether a merger increases the performance of a combined carrier over the sum of its constituent parts. We first directly compare the quantities of post-merger carriers to those of their pre-merger...

This paper examines the justifications, history, and practice of regulation in the US telecommunications sector. We examine the impact of technological and regulatory change on market structure and business strategy. Among others, we discuss the emergence and decline of the telecom bubble, the...

A country’s human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet due to its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries – the global “digital...

This experiment focuses on a contest played over a star network of 6 nodes. By placing targets in a network, the value of a target is dependent on its connectivity to other targets. The experiment compares the cases where the defense is centrally planned by a defense planner with a case where...

We empirically study a dynamic platform competition in the online daily deals promotion industry characterized by intense rivalry between two leading promotion sites, Groupon and LivingSocial, that broker between local merchants and local consumers. We find that, for a comparable deal, the...

This paper questions whether competition can replace sector-specific regulation of mobile telecommunications. We show that the monopolistic outcome may prevail independently of market concentration when access prices are determined in bilateral negotiations. A lighthanded regulatory policy can...