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...

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...

In this paper, I consider the impact of a departure from this currentsystem. I examine the possible impact of last-mile broadband providers'imposing "termination fees" on third-party content providersor application providers to reach end-users. Broadband providers wouldengage in paid...

We present a framework for measuring software quality using pricing anddemand data, and empirical estimates that quantify the extent of qualitydegradation associated with software ver- sioning. Using a 7-month,108-product panel of software sales from Amazon.com, we document theextent to which...

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...

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...

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...

Theories of multi-sided markets suggest that a platform's pricingstrategies on different sides of the market are closely linked, and inparticular, an increase in competition on one side may lead to anincrease in price on other sides. We empirically examine platforms'pricing strategies by...