The authors offer a detailed analysis of the coordination costs behind the standardization of 56K modems. They focus primarily on market events and standard-setting activities during early deployment. They argue that the canonical model for a standards war is misleading in the case of 56K. They...

56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between Internet Service Providers in the adoption process. We show that ISPs were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly striking...

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...

We study platform markets in which the information about users' preferences is dispersed. First, we show how the dispersion of information introduces idiosyncratic uncertainty about participation decisions and how the latter shapes the elasticity of the demands and the equilibrium prices. We...

We characterize a firm's profit-maximizing turnover policy in an environment where managerial productivity changes stochastically over time and is the managers' private information. Our key positive result shows that the productivity level that the firm requires for retention declines with the...

This paper considers an environment where two principals sequentially contract with a common agent and studies the exchange of information between the two bilateral relationships. We show that when (a) the upstream principal is not personally interested in the decisions of the downstream...

Recent technologies enable matching intermediaries to engage in unprecedented levels of targeting, whereby matches finely depend on the agents' characteristics, but also favor customized (i.e., match-specific) pricing. Yet, novel regulations on the transfer of personal data, as well as a renewed...

We study mediated many-to-many matching in markets in which valuations evolve over time as the result of shocks, learning through experimentation, or a preference for variety. The analysis uncovers the key tradeoffs that platforms face in the design of their matching protocols. It shows that the...

Recent technologies permit matching intermediaries to engage in unprecedented levels of targeting. Yet, regulators fear that the welfare gains of such targeting be hindered by the high degree of price customization practiced by matching intermediaries, whereby prices finely depend on the...