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 …

This paper surveys the contributions that economists have made to understanding standards-
setting processes and their consequences for industry structure and economic welfare …

There are many products for which the utility that a user derives from consumption of the
good increases with the number of other agents consuming the good. There are several …

We analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant.
The pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored. A sponsor is an …

I analyze the salient features of networks and point out the similarities between the
economic structure of networks and the structure of vertically related industries. The analysis …

Software piracy by users is generally believed to harm both software firms (through lower
profits) and buying customers (through higher prices). Thus, it is thought that perfect and …

We discuss the incentive of an exclusive holder of a technology to share it with competitors
in a market with network externalities. We assume that high expected sales increase the …

The emergence of highly interactive media and the increased connectivity among people
call for an investigation of usage behaviour of those media. People tend to rely heavily on …

Prior theoretical research has established that many software products are subject to
network effects and exhibit the characteristics of two-sided markets. However, despite the …

Recent theoretical work suggests that network externalities are a determinant of network
adoption. However, few empirical studies have reported the impact of network externalities …