As online information availability for products and services is increasing and as buyers engage in more online search prior to purchase decisions, it is becoming more important for firms to know when to invest to reduce buyer uncertainty. This article argues that today's firms should view...

In this paper, we examine how a seller sells a product/service with a positive consumption externality, and customers are uncertain about the product's/service's value. Because early adopters learn this value, we consider the customers' intrinsic signaling incentives and positive feedback...

Signal quality is a significant contributor to the overall quality of wireless telephone service, which competitive analyses often overlooks. To understand the competitive impact of signal quality investment on further consolidation in this industry, I use a market research survey of choice of...

We consider a structural model of demand and supply where firms endogenously offer vertically differentiated products and exercise second-degree price discrimination. We apply this model to the smartphone industry and quantify the welfare effects of price discrimination and competition. We use...

How has the Internet affected newspaper content? We build a dataset that matches newspaper readability measures to Internet penetration at the county-year level from 2000 – 2008. We document a positive relationship between Internet penetration and newspaper readability. This result appears...

We examine how standardization in the information and communication technologies affects the inventive activities of firms that do not contribute standards but potentially produce to the standards. In the context of the Internet Engineering Task Force, we find that as a technological area...

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...

56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between Internet Service Providers in the adoption process. We show that ISP’s were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly...