How much are we influenced by an author's identity? If identity matters, is it because we have a ``taste for status" or because it offers a useful shortcut --- a signal that is correlated with the likely importance of their ideas? This paper presents evidence from a natural experiment that took...

We examine the geography of early stage entrepreneurial finance in the context of an internet marketplace for funding new musical artist-entrepreneurs. A large body of research documents that investors in early-stage projects are disproportionately co-located with the entrepreneur. Theory...

In this paper I study how innovation investment in a software duopoly is affected by the fact that one of the firms is, or might become Open Source. Firms can either be proprietary source (PS) or open source (OS) and have different initial technological levels. An OS firm is a for profit...

We study competitive interaction between profit-maximizing firms that sell software and complementary goods or services. In addition to tactical price competition, we allow firms to compete through business model reconfigurations. We consider three business models: the proprietary model (where...

The open source model is a form of software development with source code that is typically made available to all interested parties. At the core of this process is a decentralized production process: open source software development is done by a network of unpaid software developers. Using data...

We present a model of industry standard setting with two-sided asymmetric information about the existence of intellectual property. We provide an equilibrium analysis of (a) firms' incentives to communicate ideas for improvements of an industry standard, and (b) firms' decisions to disclose the...

This paper studies a "market creating" firm (platform) that offers a matching environment by charging an access fee to a population of high and low type users who wish to form a match. We focus on an environment where users only observe a signal of their randomly assigned partner's type and...

Digital products such as movies, music and computer software are protected both by self-help measures such as encryption and copy controls, and by the legal right to prevent copying. We explore how digital rights management and other technical protections a®ect the pricing of content, and...

I examine interconnection decisions of differentiated firms. I find that previous results that firms never interconnect enough do not hold. In a Hotelling model consumers may suffer from interconnection, and firms may interconnect when it is not socially optimal. The firms interconnect too much...

I present a model to assess the impact of demand-side factors on the concentration of sales within large product assortments. Consumers face a search problem within an assortment of horizontally differentiated products supplied by a monopolist. They may search for a product match by drawing...