The issue of versioning of information goods has resurfaced, in part as a result of the recent popularity of downloadable contents (DLC) among video game manufacturers. The central idea behind the DLC strategy, zero-day DLCs in particular, is that consumers who find the base version of a game to...

The usefulness of a software product becomes obvious to consumers only after they get to experience it and, upon experiencing it, they may reach different conclusions regarding its true value. We examine the problem of designing free software trials under a general learning function. Our...

This research develops a micro-economic model to study the impact of support forums on the software industry. Motivated by the rapid growth of forums such as Stack Exchange, Quora, and Yahoo! Answers, we examine what impact they could have on a software vendor. Since these forums provide an...

The market for security software has witnessed an unprecedented growth in recent years. A closer examination of this market reveals certain idiosyncrasies that are not observed in a traditional market. For example, it is a highly competitive market with over eighty vendors. Yet, the market...

The literature on business process design has focused on issues such as bottlenecks, workflow configuration (series versus parallel), replacing an existing workflow with a shorter one, etc. One important issue that has not received adequate attention is the information-intensive nature of...