NBER Working Papers by Marc Rysman

We study a new data set of US sports card conventions in order to evaluate the pricing theory of two-sided markets. Conventions are two-sided because organizers must set fees to attract both consumers and dealers. We have detailed information on consumer price, dealer price and, since most conventions are local, the market structure for conventions. We present several findings: first, consumer pricing decreases with competition at any reasonable distance, but pricing to dealers is insensitive to competition and in longer distances even increases with competition. Second, when consumer price is zero (and thus constrained), dealer price decreases more strongly with competition. These results are compatible with existing models of two-sided markets, but are difficult to explain without such m...

Most new consumer durable goods experience rapid declines in prices and improvements in quality, suggesting the importance of modeling dynamics. This paper estimates a dynamic model of consumer preferences for new durable goods with persistent heterogeneous consumer tastes, rational expectations and repeat purchases over time. We estimate the model on the digital camcorder industry using panel data on prices, sales and characteristics. We find that standard COLIs overstate welfare gain in later periods due to a changing composition of buyers. The one-year industry elasticity in response to a transitory industry-wide price shock is about 25% less than the one-month elasticity.

56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between Internet Service Providers in the adoption process. We show that ISPs were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly striking given that industry participants expected coordination on one standard or the other. We speculate about the role of ISP differentiation in preventing the market form achieving standardization until a government organization intervened.

Standard discrete choice models such as logit, nested logit, and random coefficients models place very strong restrictions on how unobservable product space increases with the number of products. We argue (and show with Monte Carlo experiments) that these restrictions can lead to biased conclusions regarding price elasticities and welfare consequences from additional products. In addition, these restrictions can identify parameters which are not intuitively identified given the data at hand. We suggest two alternative models that relax these restrictions, both motivated by structural interpretations. Monte-Carlo experiments and an application to data show that these alternative models perform well in practice.