This paper identifies strategies to build a library consortium from a long term point of view. Contrary to the conventional wisdom to build a consortium around groups of homogenous institutions (Davis, 2002), we find that libraries with similar preferences are likely to lose from building a...

The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

The World Wide Web was originally a totally English-based medium due to its US origin. Although the presence of other languages has steadily risen, content in English is still dominant, which raises a natural question of how bilingualism of con- sumers of a home country a¤ects production of web...

We study competition between an incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more e¤ective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven when they enter the market. We show that free entry competition fails to select the most competent CRA...

We study how the presence of a news aggregator affects quality choices of newspapers competing on the Internet. To provide a microfoundation for the role of the aggregator, we build a model of multiple issues where each newspaper chooses quality on each issue. This model captures the...

We study bundling by a dominant multi-product firm facing competition from a rival multi-product firm. Compared to competition under independent pricing, competition under pure bundling reduces (increases) each firm's profit for low (high) levels of dominance, while for intermediate levels of...

We study how net neutrality regulations affect a high-bandwidth content provider's (CP) investment incentives in quality of services (QoS). We find that the effects crucially depend on network capacity levels. With limited capacity, as in mobile networks, prioritized delivery services are...

We analyze competition between interconnected networks when content is heterogeneous in its sensitivity to delivery quality. In a two-sided market framework, we characterize the equilibrium in a neutral network constrained to offer the same quality and assess the impact of such a constraint...

It is well-known from Innes and Sexton (1993, 1994) that divide-and-conquer contracts allow an incumbent facing a potential entrant to extract more surplus from buyers and hence buyers suffer from the strategy. In this paper, we show that when sellers compete by offering personalized non-linear...

Whether a microfinance institution should use a state-contingent repayment or not is very important since a state-contingent loan can provide insurance for borrowers. However, the classic Grameen bank used state non-contingent repayment, which is puzzling since it forces poor borrowers to make...