A number of technology products display positive network effects, and are used in variable quantities by heterogeneous customers. Examples include operating systems, infrastructure and back-end software, web services and networking equipment. This paper studies optimal nonlinear pricing for such...

Platforms represent a new middle ground between hierarchies and marketplaces, balancing delegation to providers with centralized control of key strategic dimensions like pricing and customer service. Market design choices are often made early in the life of a platform, thus executives must...

Will the sharing economy create long-run economic value? We develop a new dynamic model of peer-to-peer Internet-enabled rental markets for durable goods in which consumers may also trade their durable assets in (traditional) secondary markets, transaction costs and depreciation rates may vary...

The purpose of this document is to respond to selected questions forcomment on the proposed framework in the FTC report “ProtectingConsumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Businesses and Policymakers” (December 1st, 2010). Our responses are based on our ongoing...

The confluence of two digital forces—a shift towards platform-mediated peer-to-peer exchange, and a rise in the cognitive capabilities of artificial intelligence and robotics technologies—will dramatically reshape tomorrow’s workplace by making it difficult for a growing fraction of the...

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible, and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed-fee pricing in addition...

As Internet-based commerce becomes increasingly widespread, large data sets about the demand for and pricing of a wide variety of products become available. These present exciting new opportunities for empirical economic and business research, but also raise new statistical issues and...

We present a model of dynamic monopoly pricing for a good that displays network effects. In contrast with the standard notion of a rational-expectations equilibrium, we model consumers as boundedly rational, and unable either to pay immediate attention to each price change, or to make accurate...

In this paper, we analyze how different dimensions of a seller's reputation affect pricing power in electronic markets. Given the interplay between buyers' trust and sellers' pricing power, we use text mining techniques to identify and structure dimensions of importance from feedback posted on...

The effective management of digital rights is the central challenge in many industries making the transition from physical to digital products. We present a new model that characterizes the value of these digital rights when products are sold both embedded in tangible physical artifacts, and as...