Critics of capitalism contend that many products are designed to have uneconomically short lives, with the intention of forcing consumers to repurchase too frequently. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as 'planned obsolescence.'In this paper, the authors show that a competitive market may...

In Israel, area cable television licenses were auctioned sequentially. This paper provides evidence that there were interdependencies among many of the franchises and that subscriber fees for the interdependent franchises decreased over time in this auction. Copyright 1997 by Blackwell...

In this paper, the authors examine the development of the microcomputer market in the early 1980s. CP/M, a widely-adopted operating system, was orphaned by the user and the development communities. A new operating system, DOS, and a new hardware platform, the IBM PC, became the predominant...

In this paper, the authors examine the software provision decision of software firms. The provision decision by software firms determines the value and, hence, the market share of competing hardware technologies. The authors show how the provision decision by software firms determines whether...