Both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that, in many markets with standards competition, network effects make the strong grow stronger and can “tip” the market toward a single, winner-take-all standard. We hypothesize, however, that low cost digital conversion technologies, which...

There is an ongoing public policy debate regarding the role search engines can play in the fight against intellectual property theft. However, for any sensible policy discussion it must first be the case that search engine results influence consumer piracy choices, and there is very little...

We use panel data on digital song and album sales coupled with a quasi-random price experiment to determine own- and cross-price elasticities for songs and albums. We then develop a structural model of consumer demand to estimate welfare under various policy relevant counterfactual scenarios....

Internet shopbots compare prices and service levels at competing retailers, creating a laboratory for analyzing consumer choice. We analyze 20,268 shopbot consumers who select various books from 33 retailers over 69 days for a total of 1,512,856 observed offers. Although each retailer offers a...

As the Internet develops into a robust channel for commerce, it will be important to understand the characteristics of electronic markets. Businesses, consumers, government regulators, and academic researchers face a variety of questions when analyzing these nascent markets. Will electronic...

Our research empirically analyzes consumer behavior at Internet shopbots- sites that allow consumers to make "one-click" price comparisons for product offerings from multiple retailers. By allowing researchers to observe exactly what information the consumer is shown and their search behavior in...

In markets that exhibit network effects, the presence of digital conversion technologies provides an alternative mechanism to achieve compatibility. This study examines the impact of conversion technologies on market equilibrium in the context of sequential duopoly competition and proprietary...

The movie industry represents one area where digital networks have had a particularly strong impact on economic activity. These digital networks provide copyright holders with new sales and promotional channels for their content, while also providing consumers with new opportunities to obtain...

Online product review networks help to transmit information that customers can use to evaluate product quality. The prior literature has found that, in the aggregate, better product reviews lead to higher sales. However, product review networks increasingly include an explicit social component...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) services allow users to share networked resources, notably bandwidth and content, from the edges of the network. These services have been popularized because of file sharing - particularly the sharing of unlicensed copyrighted files. Concerns about such P2P file sharing were...