Sellers sometimes offer goods for sale under both a regular price and a discount for group purchase if the consumer group reaches some minimum size. This selling practice, which we term interpersonal bundling, has been popularized on the Internet by companies such as Groupon. We explain why...

Online applications and services automate communications and transactions between firms and consumers, promising large efficiency gains. However, consumers have been slow to use these online technologies intensively, despite widespread adoption of the internet. Customers frequently undergo a...

Social broadcasting networks such as Twitter in the U.S. and Weibo in China are transforming the way online word-of-mouth (WOM) is disseminated and consumed in the digital age. We investigate whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales by estimating a dynamic panel data model using publicly...

This paper considers the joint creation and consumption of content on user generated content platforms (e.g., reviews or articles, chat, videos, etc.). On these platforms, users' utilities depend upon the participation of others; hence, users' expectations regarding the participation of others...

We consider a heretofore unexplored explanation for why platforms, such as Internet service providers, might impose download limits on content consumers: doing so increases the degree to which those consumers view content providers’ products as substitutes. This, in turn, intensifies the...

We discuss the benefits of net neutrality regulation in the context of a two-sided market model in which platforms sell Internet access services to consumers and may set fees to content and applications providers “on the other side” of the Internet. When access is monopolized, we find that...

We study a retail benchmarking approach to determine access prices for interconnected networks. Instead of considering fixed access charges as in the existing literature, we study access pricing rules that determine the access price that network i pays to network j as a linear function of the...

We study how access pricing affects network competition when consumers' subscription demand is elastic and networks compete with non-linear prices and can use termination-based price discrimination. In the case of a fixed per minute termination charge, our model generalizes the results of Gans...

This paper examines the justifications, history, and practice of regulation in the US telecommunications sector. We examine the impact of technological and regulatory change on market structure and business strategy. Among others, we discuss the emergence and decline of the telecom bubble, the...

This paper evaluates the incentive of firms to vertically integrate in a simple 2X2 Bertrand model of two substitutes that are each comprised of two complementary components. It confirms that all prices fall as a result of a vertical merger. Further, we find that, when the composite goods are...