A software product becomes less valuable for its consumers over time due to technological and economic obsolescence. As a result, firms have an opportunity to introduce and sell upgrades that provide higher utility to consumers compared to an older and out-of-date software product. In a market that is growing and consists of homogeneous customers, we prove that the optimal upgrade intervals are monotonically increasing throughout the product's life cycle solely because of demand and cost considerations. This finding is in conformity with empirical evidence, thus validating our theoretical model. We then present comparative statics results to show that increase in the rate of obsolescence or network externalities may sometimes increase upgrade intervals for early upgrades and decrease these for later upgrades in the product's life cycle, but increase in market growth rate always decreases these intervals. Further, when successive software upgrades are forward compatible, upgrade intervals are longer than when they are not. Finally, we present three separate extensions of our model to showcase the robustness of our results. Since upgrade development costs depend on upgrade intervals, these insights help managers understand how costing for upgrades changes over the product's life cycle. 3 revisions. priate compatibility design between existing and new versions of a software product creates an inducement in favor of adoption of the upgrade and enables the

Online prostitution has flourished due to presence of online intermediaries. Despite the illegality of selling sexual services online, the Section 230 of Communications Decency Act shields websites from liability for unlawful postings by third parties. Consequently, the websites like Craigslist have become a haven for prostitution-related ads. In this paper, we quantify the economic impact of Craigslist's entry on prostitution incidence, and identify potential pathways in which the website affects the sex industry. Using a national panel data for 1,796 U.S. counties from 1999 to 2008, our results suggest that entry of Craigslist to a county is related to 26.61 percent increase in prostitution cases. In addition, our analyses investigates four key market mechanisms, namely the relationship to commercial vice, geographical trends, spillover effects, and enhanced policing efficacy. Our results contributes broadly to the emerging literature that researches the societal challenges associated with online intermediaries and Internet penetration.

Online commerce websites often request users to register in the online shopping process. Recognizing the challenges of user registration, many websites opt to delay their registration request until the end of the conversion funnel (i.e., ex post registration request). A new study in Information Systems Research explores an alternative approach by asking users to register with the website at the beginning of their shopping journey (i.e., ex ante registration request). The authors of the study, Ni Huang (University of Houston), Probal Mojumder (University of Southern California), Tianshu Sun (University of Southern California), Jinchi Lv (University of Southern California), and Joseph M. Golden (Collage.com), show that the ex ante request leads to an increased probability of user registration. Furthermore, the ex ante request leads to considerable increases in customer purchases in the long run and does not significantly influence sales in the short run. Further investigation into the long-term and short-term effects provides suggestive evidence on several potential mechanisms, such as firm-initiated interaction (e.g., email marketing campaigns) and screening of low-interest users (i.e., users with low initial valuations of the website and in a potentially disengaged state). This study provides managerial implications on the design of user-registration systems in e-commerce websites.

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