This paper studies a dynamic two-sided market in which consumers face switching costs between competing products. I first show that, in a symmetric equilibrium, switching costs lower the first-period price if network externalities are strong. By contrast, switching costs soften price competition...

We study monopoly and duopoly pricing in a two-sided market with dispersed information about users' preferences. We first show how the dispersion of information introduces idiosyncratic uncertainty about participation rates and how the latter shapes the elasticity of the demands and thereby the...

Restricting advertising is one way governments seek to reduce consumption of potentially harmful goods. There have been increasing calls to apply a similar policy to the junk food market. The effect will depend on how brand advertising influences consumer demand, and on the strategic pricing...

This article analyzes the effects of international trade policies on an imperfect competitive domestic market, taking into account not only consumers but also upstream and downstream firms. We first study the impact of a classic import tax decrease and we find that upstream firms are harmed and...

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and …rm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

The main goal of this study is to demonstrate the existence of a significant empirical link between infrastructure and financial sectors reforms the effects of which are reflected in infrastructure sectors performance. This paper reports on the findings of an exploration of this issue for the...

TThis paper seeks to assess the extent to which a country’s overall level of development and that of its financial sector, in particular, are factors that attract private capital into infrastructure projects. The authors investigate these effects in a 1990–2007 dataset on the power sector in...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public discontent with such...

It is well-known from Innes and Sexton (1993, 1994) that divide-and-conquer contracts allow an incumbent facing a potential entrant to extract more surplus from buyers and hence buyers suffer from the strategy. In this paper, we show that when sellers compete by offering personalized non-linear...

We study how the presence of a news aggregator affects quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a microfoundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where each newspaper chooses quality on each issue. This model captures the...