We examine two reasons why a monopoly supplier of software may introduce more upgrades than is socially optimal when the upgrade is backward but not forward compatible, so users who upgrade reduce others' network benefits. One explanation involves a commitment problem: profits and social welfare...

This article reexamines the experience of the Joint Executive Committee, an 1880s railroad cartel, to assess the applicability of the Green and Porter (1984) and Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) theories of price wars. After discussing necessary modifications to the theories, I estimate a number of...

Firms sometimes try to "poach" the customers of their competitors by offering them inducements to switch. We analyze duopoly poaching under both short-term and long-term contracts assuming either that each consumer's brand preferences are fixed over time or that preferences are independent over...

We study monopoly pricing of overlapping generations of a durable good. We consider two sorts of goods: those with an active secondhand market and anonymous consumers, such as textbooks, and those with no secondhand market and consumers who can prove that they purchased the old good to qualify...

We propose a new theory of predation based on "signal-jamming." In our model the predator's characteristics are common knowledge, while the entrant is uncertain of his own future profitability. The entrant uses his current profit to decide whether to remain in the market, and the predator preys...