The authors show that a new product monopolist may benefit from (delayed) competition if consumers incur setup costs. Setup costs create a dynamic consistency problem: the monopolist cannot guarantee low future prices once customers have incurred those costs. The authors show that, if customers anticipate this problem, the monopolist's profits can be improved through ex ante commitment to competition in the post-adoption market if setup costs are large. If setup costs are small, the monopolist can typically achieve the same level of profits without price commitment as with. Copyright 1988, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 103 (1988) Issue (Month): 4 (November) Pages: 673-94 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.