2011- Reprints: Marketing
Multi-homing in two-sided markets: An empirical inquiry in the video game console industry, Journal of Marketing, 75 (November), 39-54, 2011.
V. Landsman and S. Stremersch
(Reprint No. 184)
Two-sided markets are composed of platform owners and two distinct user networks that either buy or sell applications for the platform. The authors focus on multihoming—the choice of an agent in a user network to use more than one platform. In the context of the video game console industry, they examine the conditions affecting seller-level multihoming decisions on a given platform. Furthermore, they investigate how platform-level multihoming of applications affects the sales of the platform. The authors show that increased platform-level multihoming of applications hurts platform sales, a finding consistent with literature on brand differentiation, but they also show that this effect vanishes as platforms mature or gain market share. The authors find that platform-level multihoming of applications affects platform sales more strongly than the number of applications. Furthermore, among mature platforms, an increasing market share leads to more seller-level multihoming, while among nascent platforms, seller-level multihoming decreases as platform market share increases. These findings prompt scholars to look beyond network size in analyzing two-sided markets and provide guidance to both (application) sellers and platform owners.
Extraneous factors in judicial decisions(including reply to Weinshall-Margel and Shapard, PNAS, 108(42), E834, October 18, 2011), PANAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(17), 6889-6892, 2011.
S. Danziger, J. Levav and L. Avnaim-Pessoa
(Reprint No. 190)
Are judicial rulings based solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. In contrast, legal realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain the decisions of judges and that psychological, political, and social factors influence judicial rulings. We test the common caricature of realism that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast” in sequential parole decisions made by experienced judges. We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break. Our findings suggest that judicial rulings can be swayed by extraneous variables that should have no bearing on legal decisions.
