In the presence of switching costs, firms are often interested in expanding current market shares to exploit their customer base in the future. However, if the product is sold by retailers, manufacturers may face the problem of extracting too much surplus from the retailer. If this happens, then the latter has not an incentive to build a subscriber base. This paper would like to connect two unr...

Customer switching costs are an important factor in account-based services such as telecommu-nications, financial, insurance and brokerage services. In these businesses, existing customersincur significant costs if they switch to another provider. Such costs include physical config-uration and installation costs, contractual costs (e.g. termination fees) and cognitive costs ofle...

This work examines online linear optimization with full information and switching costs (SCs) and focuses on regret bounds that depend on properties of the loss sequences. The SCs considered are bounded functions of a pair of decisions, and regret is augmented with the total SC. We show under general conditions that for any normed SC, σ(x,x) = ‖x−x′‖, regret cannot be bounded given only a bound...

We present an empirical model of firm behavior in the presence of switching costs. Customers’ transition probabilities, embedded in firms’ value maximization, are used in a multiperiod model to derive estimable equations of a first-order condition, market share (demand), and supply equations. The novelty of the model is in its ability to extract information on both the magnitude and significanc...

This paper considers a two-period model of market entry with homogeneous products and switching costs. It is shown that the procompetitive e ect of a foreign rm's entry (i.e., unilateral trade liberalization) emerges before the entry. Also, conditions that are conducive to a competitive environment in the second-period are shown to yield a less competitive outcome in the rst-period. That is, wh...

Human performance in task-switching paradigms is seen as a hallmark of executive-control processes: switching between tasks induces switch costs (such that performance when changing from Task A to Task B is worse than on trials where the task repeats), which is generally attributed to executive control suppressing one task-set and activating the other. However, even in cases where task-sets are...

Participants switched frequently between high/low and odd/even classification of a digit. The interval between a task cue and the next digit varied between blocks. In Experiment 1, the task switched predictably every two, four, or eight trials. In Experiment 2, switching predictably every four trials was compared with random switching. With predictable switching, the cost was limited to the fir...

We present structural properties of optimal policies for the problem of scheduling a single server in a forest network of N queues (without arrivals) subject to switching penalties. In addition to linear holding costs, we impose either lump sum switching costs or batch set-up delays which are incurred at each instant the server processes a job in a queue different from the previous one. We use ...

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in languag...