This article examines the use of switching costs by long-lived strategic buyers to manage dynamic competition between rival suppliers. The analysis reveals how buyers may employ switching costs to their advantage. We show that when switching costs are high, a buyer may induce suppliers to price...

We analyze the optimal design of policies to motivate electricity distribution companies to adopt efficient distributed energy resources (DER) and manage associated project costs. The optimal policy often entails a bias against new DER projects and implements considerable cost sharing when DER...