In general, bundles are supplied with discount. Thus bundles are pro-competitive in view of increasing consumers' welfare. On the other hand, bundles are anti-competitive because of leveraging market power from dominant tying-good market to competitive tied-good market, intensifying entry...

Customer switching costs are an important factor in account-based services such as telecommunications, financial, insurance and brokerage services. In these businesses, existing customers incur significant costs if they switch to another provider. Such costs include physical configuration and...

In a competitive environment, switching costs have two eects. First, they increase the market power of a seller with locked-in customers. Second, they increase competition for new customers. I provide conditions under which switching costs decrease or increase equilibrium prices. Taken together,...

We study the strategic impacts of behavioral price discrimination (BPD) on manufacturers and retailers in a distribution channel when there are switching costs in consumer demand. Unlike previous empirical studies of behavioral price discrimination, which rely only on differences in price...

One of the perennial questions in the switching cost literature is whether switching costs enhance or harm firms' profits. In this paper, we ask what types of switching costs, among those that are commonly observed, enhance firm's profits provided that firms can i) endogenously influence the...

We analyze how different degrees of privacy protection affect industry profits, consumer welfare, and total welfare in a model with switching costs. Firms earn higher profits under weak privacy protection compared with strong or no privacy protection. The relationship between the degree of...