Jeffrey Rohlfs' 1974 Model of Facebook: An Introduction
Name
Schmalensee_Jeffrey Rohlf's.pdf
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125.21 KB
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Author(s)
Schmalensee, Richard
Date Issued
March 2011
Journal
Working paper (Sloan School of Management)
Publisher
Sloan School of Management
Citation
Schmalensee, Richard, "Jeffrey Rohlfs' 1974 Model of Facebook: An Introduction" (March 31, 2011). (MIT Sloan Working Paper ; 4893-11).
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This short essay, forthcoming in Competition Policy International, summarizes and
evaluates Jeffrey Rohlfs’ 1974 Bell Journal paper, “A Theory of Interdependent
Demand for a Telecommunications Service.” Rohlfs’ work helped create a large
literature on markets with network externalities in which demand decisions have
long-lasting consequences, a literature that has informed competition policy. But
Rohlfs assumed that demand-side decisions did not have long-lasting consequences.
Social networking and Internet-based markets of this sort are increasingly important
but have not been extensively studied. While they may pose interesting antitrust
challenges, they are almost certainly not the challenges to which the post-Rohlfs
literature pointed.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1802053
