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...

As software ages, it is increasingly unable to leverage new technologies and fulfill the evolving user requirements. As a result, firms get an opportunity to introduce and sell upgrades that provide higher utility to consumers compared to an older and out-of-date software product. This is...

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...

The existence of reference price effects in consumer decision making is well documented in prior research, but few studies focus on its implications for firms' strategic behavior. Using a competitive model, we address this gap by examining how firms' product positioning and pricing strategies in...

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...