This thesis addresses theoretical and empirical questions related to network economics. In particular, it analyze network effects and switching costs in the mobile telecommunications industry. The first chapter analyzes competition in a two-period differentiated-products duopoly in the presence...

Motivated by policy makers' recent interest in reducing switching costs in various network industries to increase competition, this paper investigates how switching costs affect market outcome in such industries. The results show that the effects of switching costs on market concentration and...

We study oligopoly price competition between multiproduct firms---firms whose products interact in the profit function. Specifically, we focus on the impact of intrafirm product interactions on the level of equilibrium profits. This impact may be decomposed in two different ways: (a) a direct...

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...

We analyze market dynamics under Bertrand duopoly competition in industries with network effects and consumer switching costs. Consumers form installed bases, repeatedly buy the products, and differ with respect to their switching costs. Depending on the ratio of switching costs to network...

This paper probes the phenomenon of delayed cable digitization in countries such as Korea and Taiwan. The paper first performed a cross-country longitudinal analysis on the 16 countries in the Asia Pacific region and found out that 1. inter-platform competition, primarily from DBS, generates the...

In this paper we utilize discrete choice experiment method to identify and measure switching costs and network effects in mobile telephony in Poland. Based on hypothetical choices consumers make we construct a conditional random parameters multinomial logit model to analyze their preferences. In...

This paper probes the phenomenon of delayed cable digitization in countries such as Korea and Taiwan. The paper first performed a cross-country longitudinal analysis on the 16 countries in the Asia Pacific region and found out that 1. inter-platform competition, primarily from DBS, generates the...

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...