A country’s human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet due to its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries – the global “digital...

We investigate the impact of backward compatibility on the adoption of multi-generation platforms. Our context is a mobile platform where platform users download services from third party providers. For each hardware platform generations, the services depend greatly on the embedded...

We examine the effects of mobile termination rate regulation in asymmetric oligopolies. We do this by extending existing models of asymmetric duopoly and symmetric oligopoly where consumer expectations about market shares are passive. We first calibrate product differentiation parameters using...

This paper proposes to incorporate product customization in the Maskin and Riley (1984) nonlinear pricing model in order to capture major features of mobile service data. In particular, consumers are characterized by a two-dimensional type. One dimension is observed by the provider and...

I generalize the workhorse model of network competition (Armstrong, 1998; Laffont, Rey and Tirole, 1998a,b) to include income effects in call demand. Income effects imply that call demand depends also on the subscription fee, not only on the call price. In the standard case of differentiated...

We consider a two-sided market model with a monopolistic Internet Service Provider (ISP), network congestion sensitive content providers (CPs), and Internet customers in order to study the impact of Quality-of-Service (QoS) tiering on service innovation, broadband investments, and welfare in...

We analyze how termination charges affect retail prices when taking into account that receivers derive some utility from a call and when firms may charge consumers for receiving calls. A novel feature of our paper is that we consider passive self-fulfilling expectations and do not allow for...

We analyze firms' incentives to bundle and tie in the telecommunications industry. As a first step, we develop a discrete-choice demand model where firms sell products that may combine several services in bundles, and consumers choose assortments of different types of products available from...

Since 2008, multiple smartphone platforms have launched versions of “app stores”, marketplaces where consumers can purchase and download software applications for their smartphone. This paper provides evidence for both demand and supply of “apps” using data on the size and composition of...

In this article I analyze the effects of a recent reform intended to decrease switching costs in the cellular industry. The reform, implemented in Chile in 2012, allowed cell phone users to switch operators without any contract restriction while keeping their wireless number. Its aim was the...