In markets subject to network effects, firms often remove some functions of their original products and sell a functionally-downgraded version at a lower or zero price. This paper aims to provide a pure network effect based explanation of such a practice. Building a functional degradation model...

This paper examines how the presence of network externalities affects a monopolist’s incentive for quality degradation and its welfare consequence. The software and the Internet service industries provide our primary motivation. The network externality may lead to a Pareto-improving quality...

This paper extends the standard monopoly quality differentiation model by Mussa and Rosen (1978) to an environment where the production of a (qualitydifferentiated) product-line involves initial fixed investments in common assets such as production facilities or R&D. The fixed cost depends...

This paper examines how a durable-goods monopolist’s choice of product quality interacts with time inconsistency problems in an environment, where the firm faces an irreversible decision on quality and unit production costs increase in quality. The monopolist may have incentives to choose a...

I analyze a durable-goods monopolistÕs incentives to introduce a damaged good (a stripped down version of the original good) in an infinite-horizon framework. The damaged good helps the monopolist to mitigate the Coasian time-inconsistency problem. However, it may lead to a welfare reduction:...

A durable-goods monopolist may use quality degradation as a commitment not to lower price in the future. The introduction of damaged goods expedites low-valuation consumers’ future demands, and helps the firm to mitigate the Coasian time-consistency problem. In such a case, damaged goods are...

This paper examines the dynamic pricing problem of a durable-good monopolist when product quality is endogenous. It is shown that the relationship between the firm's quality choice and the time-inconsistency problem crucially depends on how the unit production cost varies with quality. The...