This paper is about how firms choose products. Product changes are frequent events at US manufacturing plants. Over two thirds of surviving plants add and/or drop at least one product every five years. We develop a theoretical model that integrates endogenous product choice into a dynamic analysis of industry evolution with entry and exit and heterogeneous firms. In equilibrium, firm productivi...

In this paper I estimate the magnitude of switching costs in the UK mobile industry. Using a survey data with individual choices of network operators in two consecutive years I find a presence of very strong average switching costs, which make the majority of consumers reluctant to switch networks. The size of average switching costs differs significantly across networks and the observed switch...

The Pennsylvania Adoption Exchange (PAE) helps case workers who represent children in state custody by recommending prospective families for adoption. We describe PAE’s operational challenges using case worker surveys and analyze child outcomes through a regression analysis of data collected over multiple years. A match recommendation spreadsheet tool implemented by PAE incorporates insights fr...

Business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce has become an important issue in the debate about electronic commerce. How should the intermediary charge suppliers and buyers to maximize profits from such a marketplace? We analyze a monopolistic B2B marketplace owned by an independent intermediary. The marketplace exhibits two-sided network effects where the value of the marketplace to buyers is...

The phrase ‘‘cooperative federalism’’ has been used to refer to ‘‘federal programs that charge state agencies -as well as federal ones -with the responsibility of interpreting and implementing federal law.’’1 Because cooperative federalism entails ‘‘shared federal and state government responsibility,’’2 it raises difficult and continuing questions about the extent to which the responsibilities ...

Current-based tests are the most effective methods available to detect resistive shorts. Delta IDDQ testing is the most sensitive variant and can handle off-state currents of 10-100 mA of a single core. Nevertheless this is not sufficient to handle the next generations of very deep sub-micron technologies. Moreover delay-fault testing and very-low voltage testing are not a real alternative for ...

T paper presents a dynamic investment game in which firms that are initially identical develop assets that are specialized to different market segments. The model assumes that there are increasing returns to investment in a segment, for example, as a result of word-of-mouth or learning curve effects. I derive three key results: (1) Under certain conditions there is a unique equilibrium in which...

VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) system is known as an effective mechanism to reduce the bullwhip effect between suppliers and buyers, by switching the responsibility of inventory management from buyers to suppliers. Although most attempts of VMI implementation have been successful, there were some failure cases such as in South Korea. VMI system was beneficial only to the buyer and hurt the long...

In this paper a sufficient condition on the minimum dwell time that guarantees the stability of switched linear systems is given. The proposed method interprets the stability of switched linear systems through the distance between the eigenvector sets of subsystem matrices. Thus, an explicit relation in view of stability is obtained between the family of the involved subsytems and the set of ad...

With advances in information technology, internet banking in developing countries is increasing in popularity, giving individuals more choices in how they do their banking. However, the uptake by individuals especially for developing countries has been slow, despite increased access to enabling technologies. While much has been done to determine what encourages adoption, little is known of what...