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...

This paper investigates how switching costs affect product compatibility and market dynamics in network industries. A reduction in the switching cost makes the firms' products more attractive relative to the outside good, which diminishes the market expansion benefit of making products...

Motivated by policy makers' recent interest in reducing switching costs in various network industries to increase competition, this paper investigates how switching costs affect market outcome in such industries. The results show that the effects of switching costs on market concentration and...

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...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc.demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...