Strong network effects generate multiple tipping equilibria, in which firms compete for the adoption of all consumers rather than the marginal consumer. In this scenario, a quality distortion—the Spence distortion—should be absent; this contradicts the well-established Spence distortion...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...

Switching costs and network effects bind customers to vendors if products are incompatible, locking customers or even markets in to early choices. Lock-in hinders customers from changing suppliers in response to (predictable or unpredictable) changes in efficiency, and gives vendors lucrative ex...

"Destructive Creation" is the deliberate introduction of new, perhaps improved generations of durable goods that destroy, directly or indirectly, the usage value of units previously sold inducing consumers to repeat their purchase. This paper discusses this practice by a single seller in an...

A sizable literature has grown up in recent years focusing on two-sided markets in which economies of scale combined with complementarities between a platform and its associated 'software' or 'services' can generate indirect network effects (that is positive feedback between the number of...

The extant economic and marketing literature on product line design mainly addresses firm's product decisions in conventional markets. However, many products demonstrate salient network externalities in their consumption, such as computers, software, telephone, telefax, and Internet routers. To...

Should platforms be held liable for the harms suffered by users? A two-sided platform enables interactions between firms and users. There are two types of firm: harmful and safe. Harmful firms impose larger costs on the users. If firms have deep pockets then platform liability is unnecessary....

We explore the logic of predation and rules designed to prevent it in markets subject to network effects. Although, as many have informally argued, predatory behavior is plausibly more likely to succeed in such markets, we find that it is particularly hard to intervene in network markets in ways...

I develop a general theory of monopoly pricing of networks. Platforms use insulating tariffs to avoid coordination failure, implementing any desired allocation. Profit-maximization distorts in the spirit of Spence (1975) by internalizing only network externalities to marginal users. Thus the...