@techreport{oai:kobe-cufs.repo.nii.ac.jp:00001235,
 author = {Tanaka, Satoru},
 issue = {3},
 month = {Mar},
 note = {We analyze the effects of an incumbent’s investment in backward compatibility of new products with old ones in the presence of network effects. Under consumer’s utility function consisting of two components, “stand-alone valuation” and “network-dependent valuation”, we show that incumbent’s investment level in backward compatibility always exceeds the social optimum because it raises consumers’ switching costs in socially undesirable way. In addition to this, this divergence of incumbent’s investment from a socially optimal one strongly depends on consumer’s utility. Using a specified utility function, it is shown that this divergence could increase with the degree of complementarity between two components in utility function under some situations., application/pdf},
 title = {Simple economics of backward compatibility in the presence of network effects},
 year = {1999}
}