The paper proposes an analytical framework for comparing different business models for producing information goods and digital services. It is based on three dimensions that also refer to contrasted literature: the economics of matching, the economics of assembling and the economics of knowledge...

This paper provides a first pass at comparing two polar strategies for market intermediation: "merchant" mode – buying from sellers and reselling to buyers - and "two-sided platform" mode – enabling affiliated sellers to sell directly to affiliated buyers. The merchant mode is more profitable...

This paper develops a model of oligopolistic price competition to analyze the impact of online intermediaries such as Autobytel.com on the price setting process in the automobile market. The roles of dealer search costs, the fraction of buyers using the intermediary, the value of the item being...

Developing a simple model of the content and access industries in the digital era, we show that, given the positive consumption externality from entertainment content (music, video) on access networks and playing devices (fixed broadband, 3G mobile, digital players, etc.), both content and...

Most digital goods have a modular design; that is, they consist of complementary and distinct building blocks, called modules. Modular product design, in contrast to integrated (or integral) design, enables alteration of a specific module that is usually assigned for a specific function without...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow users to share networked resources, notably bandwidth and content, from the edges of the network. These services have been popularized because of file sharing – particularly the sharing of unlicensed copyrighted files. However, content owners are increasingly...

We designed a platform with a betting mechanism for eliciting costly, dispersed information of different quality. Our objective is to elicit both dispersed information and the precision of the information so as to efficiently weight dispersed information to produce reliable forecasts. After...

This paper traces the history of TEX, the open source typesetting program. TEX was an early and very successful open source project that imposed its standards in a particularly competitive environment and inspired many advances in the typesetting industry. Developed over three decades, TEX came...

This paper addresses the investment impact of network sharing mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Such investments involve sunk costs and so are irreversible. Regulators allow entrants to utilize such facilities at prices reflecting the cost of building a new, efficient, large-scale...