This paper presents a framework to analyze the potential changes in transaction costs due to theintroduction of e-commerce on transactions between businesses. It then illustrates and applies thisframework using internal data from an Internet-based firm to measure process improvements,marketplace...

The introduction of a new product generation forces incumbents in network industries to rebuild their installed base to maintain an advantage over potential entrants. We study if backward compatibility can help moderate this process of rebuilding an installed base. Using a structural model of...

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers’ behavioris affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where thereare no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensationscheme in...

Large companies are usually organized into business units, yet some activitiesare almost always centralized in a company-wide functional unit. We firstshow that organizations endogenously create an incentive conflict between functionalmanagers (who desire excessive standardization) and...

Platforms operators act as private regulators to increase usage and maximize profits. Their goals depend on the development of the platform: overcoming the chicken-egg problem early on requires attracting platform participants while quality becomes more important later on. Private regulators...

Recent events involving major insurance companies and insurance brokerage firms highlight substantial incentive problems in commercial and reinsurance markets where intermediation takes place. We show that in markets with informed as well as uninformed consumers and heterogeneous risk profiles...

This paper seeks to understand the intriguing but only sparsely explored phenomenon of “leisure timeinvention,” where the main underlying idea for the new product or process occurs when the inventor isaway from the workplace. We add to previous research by focussing on the inventive...