This paper develops a model of pricing to deter entry by a sole supplier of a network good. The authors show that the installed user base of a network good can serve a preemptive function similar to that of an investment in capacity if the entrant's good is incompatible with the incumbent's good...

Firms sometimes try to "poach" the current customers of their competitors by offering them special inducements to switch. The authors analyze duopoly poaching under both short-term and long-term contracts in two polar cases: either each consumer's brand preferences are constant from one period...

This paper explores a monopolist's incentives to provides upgraded versions of its software. In particular, the authors examine how market power, commitment problems and price discrimination may lead a monopolistice supplier of a network good to introduce upgrades when social welfare would be...

We argue that some but not all superstitions can persist when learning is rational and players are patient, and illustrate our argument with an example inspired by the code of Hammurabi. The code specified an “appeal by surviving in the river” as a way of deciding whether an accusation was...

This paper studies the monopoly pricing of overlapping generations of a durable good. We focus on two sorts of goods: those with an active second-hand market and anonymous consumers, such as textbooks, and gods such as software, where there is no second-hand market and consumers are...

Consider a model of location choice by two sorts of agents, called “buyers”and “sellers:”In the first period agents simultaneously choose between two identical possible locations; following this, the agents at each location play some sort of game with the other agents there. Buyers...

We define and analyze "strategic topologies" on types, under which two types are close if their strategic behavior will be similar in all strategic situations. To oper- ationalize this idea, we adopt interim rationalizability as our solution concept, and define a metric topology on types in the...

We propose that a simple “dual-self” model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities, including the apparent time-inconsistency that has motivated models of hyperbolic discounting and Rabin’s paradox of risk aversion in the large and small. The model also implies that...

This paper studies the conditions under which two competing and otherwise identical markets or auction sites of different sizes can coexist in equilibrium, without the larger one attracting all of the smaller one’s patrons. We find that the range of equilibrium market sizes depends on the...