We study the impact of switching costs on the long run outcome in 2 × 2 coordination games played in the circular city model of local interactions. For low levels of switching costs the predictions are in line with the previous literature and the risk dominant convention is the unique long run equilibrium. For intermediate levels of switching costs the set of long run equilibria still contains ...

Dear Editor: Medical education is associated with significant costs [1]. Those who are responsible for the delivery of medical education must continually make decisions that have financial consequences [2]. Sometimes decisions are to invest in a new product or service, sometimes to disinvest. Sometimes decisions involve the educator realising that they should switch from one provider of medical...

We study a dynamic model with an incumbent monopolist and entry in every subsequent period. We first show that if all consumers have the same switching cost, then the intertemporal profits of the incumbent are the same as if there was only one period. We then study the consequences of heterogeneity of switching costs. We prove that even low switching cost customers have value for the incumbent:...

This paper investigates how consumer switching costs affect firms’ compatibility choices and social welfare in network industries. Firms face a choice between two modes of competition: make their networks incompatible and compete fiercely for market dominance, or make their networks compatible and have mild competition. By incentivizing firms to harvest their locked-in consumers rather than pri...

We show that small switching costs can have surprisingly dramatic effects in infinitely repeated games if these costs are large relative to payoffs in a single period. This shows that the results in Lipman and Wang do have analogs in the case of infinitely repeated games [Lipman, B., Wang, R., 2000. Switching costs in frequently repeated games. J. Econ. Theory 93, August 2000, 149–190]. We also...

We show that the presence of sufficiently significant switching costs, which are increasing in the degree of product differentiation, generates an equilibrium configuration with maximal differentiation within the framework of a Hotelling model with linear transportation costs. The equilibrium with maximal differentiation offers a formalization of the idea that competing firms have noncooperativ...

We show that the presence of sufficiently significant switching costs, which are increasing in the degree of product differentiation, generates an equilibrium configuration with maximal differentiation within the framework of a Hotelling model with linear transportation costs. The equilibrium with maximal differentiation offers a formalization of the idea that competing firms have noncooperativ...

We develop a continuous-time dynamic model of competition with switching costs to show that in a relatively simple Markov Perfect equilibrium, the dominant …rm concedes market share by charging higher prices than the smaller …rm. In the short-run, switching costs might have two types of anti-competitive e¤ects: …rst, higher switching costs imply a slower transition to a symmetric market structu...

In markets where consumers have switching costs and firms cannot price discriminate, firms have two conflicting strategies. A firm can either offer a low price to attract new consumers and build future market share or a firm can offer a high price to exploit the partial lock-in of their existing consumers. This paper develops a theory of competition when overlapping generations of consumers hav...