We develop and analyze a model of pricing for digital products withdiscontinuous supply functions. This characterizes a number ofinformation technology-based products and services for which variableincreases in demand are fulfilled by the addition of 'blocks' ofcomputing or network...

A series of recent papers have investigated the nature of trading andsorting induced by the dynamic price mechanism in a competitive durablegood market with adverse selection and exogenous entry of traders overtime. These models are dynamic versions of Akerlof's (1970) seminalwork. The general...

It is well known that the Internet has significantly reduced consumers'search costs online. But relatively little is known about how searchcosts affect consumer demand structure in online markets. In this paper,we identify the impact of search costs on firm competition and marketstructure by...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising – where advertiserspay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic(non-sponsored) web search results – is gaining ground as thelargest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique paneldataset of several hundred...

We analyze how di erent dimensions of a seller's reputation a ectpricing power in electronic markets. We do so by using text miningtechniques to identify and structure dimensions of importance fromfeedback posted on reputation systems, by aggregating and scoring thesedimensions based on the...

As Internet-based commerce becomes increasingly widespread, large datasets about the demand for and pricing of a wide variety of productsbecome available. These present exciting new opportunities for empiricaleconomic and business research, but also raise new statistical issuesand challenges. In...

This paper examines the justifications, history, and practice ofregulation in the US telecommunications sector. We examine the impact oftechnological and regulatory change on market structure and businessstrategy. Among others, we discuss the emergence and decline of thetelecom bubble, the...

This paper evaluates the incentive of firms to vertically integrate in asimple 2X2 Bertrand model of two substitutes that are each comprised oftwo complementary components. It confirms that all prices fall as aresult of a vertical merger. Further, we find that, when the compositegoods are poor...

The vast majority of U.S. residential consumers face a monopoly orduopoly in broadband Internet access. Until now, the Internet has beencharacterized by a regime of 'net neutrality,' which means there hasbeen no discrimination between the price of transmitting packets basedon the identity of...

We examine the intersection of patents and antitrust where a patentholder uses the monopoly power it possesses in the market for a patentedproduct to exclude competitors in an adjacent market and attempt tomonopolize or monopolize the adjacent market. The present scheme forawarding patents...