The Internet has drastically altered the nature of competition in the news industry. This article develops a model of price and quality competition between firms in the online news industry. In equilibrium, firms randomise in their pricing strategies and this generates the cross- sectional...

In Electronic Payment Networks (EPNs) the No-Surcharge Rule (NSR) requires that merchants charge the same final good price regardless of the means of payment chosen by the customer. In this paper, we analyze a three-party model (consumers, merchants, and proprietary EPNs) to assess the impact of...

The recent years have exhibited a burst in the amount of collaborative activities among firms selling complementary products. This paper aims at providing a rationale for such a large extent of collaboration ties among complementors. To this end, we analyze a game in which the two producers of a...

We study merger waves in vertically related industries where firms can engage in both vertical and horizontal mergers. Even though any individual merger would have been profitable, firms may refrain from merging for fear of negative impacts from other mergers. When they do merge, however, they...

This paper advances our collective knowledge about the role of learning in retail agglomeration. Uncertainty about new markets provides an opportunity for sequential learning, where one firm's past entry decisions signal to others the potential profitability of risky markets. The setting is...

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

We study duopoly pricing in the market for mobile phone service, which features network externalities, switching costs, and consumer heterogeneity. We introduce a steady state approach that enables a tractable analysis without endgame effects. The model can generate a variety of testable...

The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

Pricing of Internet access has been characterized by two properties. Parties are directly billed only by the Internet Service Provider (ISP) through which they connect to the Internet and the ISP charges them on the basis of the amount of information transmitted rather than its content. These...

This paper studies the impact of heterogeneity in interdependence of trader values on price inference and welfare. A model of double auction with quasilinear-quadratic utilities is introduced that allows for arbitrary Gaussian information structures. With heterogeneous interdependence, some...