This discussion paper led to an article in <I>Games and Economic Behavior</I> (2012), pp. 120-138.<P> We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers are heterogeneous in knowledge: some consumers know both the prices and quality of the products offered,...</p></i>

Firms signal high quality through high prices even if the market structure is highly competitive and price competition is severe. In a symmetric Bertrand oligopoly where products may differ only in their quality, production cost is increasing in quality and the quality of each firm’s product...

In this paper we investigate whether markets with heterogeneous network externalities can belocked-in by old technologies even if superior technologies are available. Heterogeneous networkexternalities are present when some consumers care more about the size of the market share of agood than...

Software development activities have been identified as a 'window of opportunity' for latecomer companies. Notwithstanding the growth of software development activities in the latecomers, there are single exceptional cases of companies that have successfully launched their own products in global...

The paper makes an attempt to examine systematically the capabilities for software production in a latecomer context and to propose an approach for analysing the technological capabilities (TC) in a latecomer software industry. Taking the analysis one step further than identifying capabilities,...