We study a new data set of US sports card conventions in order to evaluate the pricing theory of two-sided markets. Conventions are two-sided because organizers must set fees to attract both consumers and dealers. We have detailed information on consumer price, dealer price and, since most...

Most new consumer durable goods experience rapid prices declines and quality improvements, suggesting the importance of modeling dynamics. This paper specifies a dynamic model of consumer preferences for new durable goods with persistently heterogeneous consumer tastes, rational expectations,...

We discuss prospects for innovation in consumer payment instruments. We discuss recent research into consumer payments and what can be learned about consumer behavior towards new payment options. We consider three new innovations in payments: mobile payments, faster payments and digital...

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...

Standard discrete choice models such as logit, nested logit, and random coefficients models place very strong restrictions on how unobservable product space increases with the number of products. We argue (and show with Monte Carlo experiments) that these restrictions can lead to biased...

How do public and private information affect equilibrium allocations and social welfare in economies with investment complementarities? And what is the optimal transparency in the information conveyed, for example, by economic statistics, policy announcements, or news in the media? We first...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in macro models with heterogeneity in information and complementarity in actions. These models deliver promising positive properties, such as heightened inertia and volatility. But they also raise important normative questions, such as whether...

This paper examines equilibrium and welfare in a tractable class of economies with externalities, strategic complementarity or substitutability, and incomplete information. In equilibrium, complementarity amplifies aggregate volatility by increasing the sensitivity of actions to public...

This paper studies policy in a class of economies in which information about commonly-relevant fundamentals -- such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions -- is dispersed and can not be centralized by the government. In these economies, the decentralized use of information can fail to...

Global games of regime change -- that is, coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it -- have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We...