This paper analyzes the impact of online customer reviews on purchasing decisions and the influence of online customer or peer reviews compared to other channels of information such as offline press (expert reviews) and trial versions (personal reviews). Using 7,024 answers of an anonymous...

In this paper, we study the development of mobile payments as an innovation in developed countries. In particular, we introduce five cooperation models that have emerged or could emerge between banks, mobile network operators, and payment systems, for the development of this new payment method....

In the telecommunications industry, the ladder-of-investment approach claims that service-based competition (when entrants lease access to incumbents' facilities) can serve as a “stepping stone” for facility-based entry (when entrants build their own infrastructures to provide services). In...

In recent years, a number of studies have shown that institutions are crucial to economic development. This literature has highlighted a positive relationship between the quality of the macro-institutional environment and the performance of reform policies conducted in some key sectors of the...

In this paper, we consider products that are composed of distinct components that can be shared with rival firms through licensing agreements. In contrast to the standard licensing settings in which firms make binary choices (whether to license or not), the innovator decides on the set of...

In this paper we study how a phase of service-based competition during which a new entrant operator leases access to an incumbent operator's network affects the entrant's incentives to build an alternative infrastructure. In line with the "stepping stone" and "ladder of investment" arguments, we...

In this paper, we provide scenarios of evolution for the recorded music industry. These scenarios are based on two dimensions. First, we identify two strategies of revenue extraction in a digital world: either through the sale of content, which requires a direct or indirect protection of music...

This paper studies the incentives of a merchant to bypass a payment platform by issuing private cards. In our model, a payment platform allocates the total cost of a card transaction between a monopolistic issuer and a monopolistic acquirer by choosing an quot;interchange feequot;. We determine...

The "ladder of investment" is a regulatory approach proposed by Martin Cave (2006), which has been widely embraced by national regulatory authorities in the European telecommunications sector. The approach entails providing entrants, successively, with different levels of access - the "rungs" of...