The vast majority of US residential consumers face a monopoly or duopoly in broadband Internet access. Up to now, the Internet was characterizedby a regime of 'net neutrality' where there was no discrimination in theprice of a transmitted information packet based on the identities ofeither the...

This paper responds to arguments made in filings in the FCC's broadband openness proceeding (GN Dkt. 09-191) and incorporates data made available since my January 14th filing in that proceeding. Newly available data confirm that there is limited competition in the broadband access marketplace....

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 consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers and mobile-phone networks, offer plans with download limits: through one of two mechanisms, doing so causes the providers of the content consumer purchase to either reduce their prices or...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of international simple resale (ISR) authorization on the prices for international message telephone service (IMTS). We compile a firm-level panel data set for over 200 United States-foreign country bilateral markets from 1995 to 2004. These data...

When platforms compete for consumers, two types of consumer heterogeneity will matter: consumers value the presence of other consumers on a platform differently, and consumers contribute to the value of the platform differently. The optimal discriminatory pricing policy for platforms will depend...

How much are we influenced by an author's identity? If identity matters, is it because we have a "taste for status" or because it offers a useful shortcut - a signal that is correlated with the likely importance of their ideas? This paper presents evidence from a natural experiment that took...

Sellers sometimes offer goods for sale under both a regular price and a discount for group purchase if the consumer group reaches some minimum size. This selling practice, which we term interpersonal bundling, has been popularized on the Internet by companies such as Groupon. We explain why...

In many industries, consumers rely on recommendations by an intermediary when choosing between competing products. In this paper, we look at how the existence of contracts between firms and intermediaries affects the quality of the advice received by consumers, and firms' incentives to invest in...

We study the dynamics of usage intensity of second-generation cellular telephony over the diffusion curve. Specifically, we address two questions: First, can we draw conclusions about the underlying drivers of technology diffusion by studying usage intensity? Second, what is the effect of high...