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Contact
Information: H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management and Tepper School of Business Carnegie Mellon University 4800 Forbes Avenue, HBH 2105D Pittsburgh PA, 15217 Email: 
Voice: 412-268-5978 Fax: 412-268-5338 Office: Hamburg Hall 2105D Assistant: Gretchen Hunter (Hamburg Hall 2101, 412-268-6076) |
New:
- Apr-08: We have a new paper that looks at how the
importance of network effects might change in the
context of purely digital goods that can be easily
converted from one format to another. We develop a
model of sequential duopoly competition and
proprietary technology standards. We find that unless
network effects are very large, firms will provide
converters to all consumers. This makes both the
entrant and incumbent better off since the provision
of converters alleviates price competition in the
market.
- Jan-08: Here is a new paper that examines the impact of
used markets on sales of CDs and DVDs. In prior work,
we found that markets for used books sold on Amazon
did not significantly cannibalize new book sales. In
this follow-on work we find that used CDs and DVDs do
significantly cannibalize new product sales, possibly
because of the digital nature of the product. We argue
that this result provides a further advantage to
digital distribution strategies for firms selling
digital goods because digitally distributed goods are
not subject to the first sale doctrine and thus cannot
be sold in used markets.
- Dec-07: This paper analyzing strategic pricing
issues in content delivery networks has been accepted
for publication at Management Science
- Dec-07: This paper was the first runner-up for
the Information Systems Research best
published paper award for 2007.
- Nov-07: Here is a new paper that examines the impact of
television broadcasts on DVD sales and Internet
piracy. Using a new dataset, we find that television
broadcasts of movies result in an immediate increase
in the demand for DVDs of that movie and in the demand
for pirated copies of that movie. However, we also
find that the presence of pirated material at the time
of broadcast does not reduce the demand for DVDs. That
is, consumers who are interested in purchasing the
DVD, are not dissuaded from that purchase by the
presence of pirated material, at least for the movies
in our sample.
- Oct-07: Here is a new paper that uses data from the flash
memory market to empirically show that the presence of
digital converters reduced the price premium of
leading flash memory card formats. This made producers
of non-dominant standards better off. We argue that
this had various positive benefits for the market,
including increased the overall product variety.
- July-07: This paper analyzing the academic
literature related to business models for peer-to-peer
networks has been accepted for publication in the
Review of Network Economics
- May-07: Here is another new paper that examines how the
increased penetration of shopbots impacts prices and
price dispersion in markets. Our work builds on the
existing literature (notably Brown and Goolsbee in the context of
term life insurance), by adding the ability to analyze
changes in shopbot use over time (as opposed to
before-after observation of the introduction of
shopbots). We find that increased shopbot use drives
down both prices and price dispersion.