The introduction of product upgrades in a competitive environment is commonly observed in the software industry. When introducing a new product, a software vendor may employ behavior-based price discrimination (BBPD) by offering a discount over its market price to entice existing customers of...

Access to a platform's services often requires consumers to use a complementary hardware product or service, e.g., Internet service is needed to access the YouTube platform. Typically, such access products are provided by third-party firms. More recently, however, some major platforms like...

Many software product firms release a public beta prior to launching its product. Public betas are adopted by innovator consumers and firms use free feedback from these consumers to improve the quality of the product. While trying out the public beta, innovators also learn their product...

Customers often evaluate products at brick-and-mortar stores to identify their “best fit” product but buy it for a lower price at a competing online retailer. This free-riding behavior by customers is referred to as “showrooming” and we show that this is detrimental to the profits of the...

The rapid pace of technological innovation necessitates Information Technology (IT) services firms to continually invest in replenishing the skills of their key asset base, the human capital. We examine whether human capital investments directed towards employee training are effective in...

The ongoing digitization of multiple industries has drastically reduced the half-life of skills and capabilities acquired by knowledge workers through formal education. Thus, firms are forced to make significant ongoing investments in training their employees to remain competitive. Existing...

In this paper, we model competition between two software product vendors, an incumbent and entrant, with specific focus on the role of switching costs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that under certain conditions the switching costs imposed by the incumbent's product could actually...

Many successful open source projects have been developed by who were employed by firms but worked on the open source projects on the side due to economic incentives like career improvement benefits. Such side work may be a good thing for the employing firms too if they get some strategic value...

As software ages, it is increasingly unable to leverage new technologies and fulfill evolving user requirements. Firms producing software products therefore get an opportunity to introduce and sell upgrades. Our research looks at the optimal intervals between upgrades, and whether these...