We study the effects of improvements in eBay's rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did not lead to...

This paper studies the introduction of new products (increase in product variety) in the automobile industry. The focus is on the two sources of market power that may allow the firms to get higher profits (and, thus, recoup investments): new products and brand-name reputation. The effects of new...

This paper investigates how video game publishers' choice of game release date is affected by the expected level of competition within the game's product niche. We identify game niches by genre, age-appropriateness, a four week window cohort, publisher and console system. Our analysis is based...

Open standard-setting organizations (SSOs) have emerged as important coordination and diffusion mechanism for information and communication technologies. Open standards are developed non-discriminatorily and licensed to anybody at reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Little is known about...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...