This paper develops a model of pricing to deter entry by a sole supplier of a network good. The authors show that the installed user base of a network good can serve a preemptive function similar to that of an investment in capacity if the entrant's good is incompatible with the incumbent's good...

Firms sometimes try to "poach" the current customers of their competitors by offering them special inducements to switch. The authors analyze duopoly poaching under both short-term and long-term contracts in two polar cases: either each consumer's brand preferences are constant from one period...

"Income smoothing" is the process of manipulating the time profile of earnings or earnings reports to make the reported income stream less variable. This paper builds a theory of income smoothing based on the managers' concern about keeping their position or avoiding interference, and on the...

The authors modify the standard principal-agent model with oral hazard by allowing the contract to be renegotiated after the agent's choice of action and before the observation of the action's consequences. In equilibrium, the agent randomizes over effort levels. The optimal contract gives the...

This article studies the implications of learning-by-doing for market conduct and performance. We use a general continuous-time model to show that output increases over time in the absence of strategic interactions, and that a monopolist learns too slowly, compared with the social optimum. We...

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...

This paper studies the monopoly pricing of overlapping generations of a durable good. We focus on two sorts of goods: those with an active second-hand market and anonymous consumers, such as textbooks, and gods such as software, where there is no second-hand market and consumers are...