Building and Delivering the Virtual World: Commercializing Services for Internet Access
40 Pages Posted: 17 May 2000 Last revised: 8 Jul 2022
Date Written: May 2000
Abstract
This study analyzes the service offerings of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the commercial suppliers of Internet access in the United States. It presents data on the services of 2089 ISPs in the summer of 1998. By this time, the Internet access industry had undergone its first wave of entry and many ISPs had begun to offer services other than basic access. This paper develops an Internet access industry product code which classifies these services. Significant heterogeneity across ISPs is found in the propensity to offer these services, a pattern with an unconditional urban/rural difference. Most of the explained variance in behavior arises from firm-specific factors, with only weak evidence of location-specific factors for some services. These findings provide a window to the variety of approaches taken to build viable businesses organizations, a vital structural feature of this young market.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Free Entry and Social Inefficiency in Radio Broadcasting
By Steven Berry and Joel Waldfogel
-
Who Benefits Whom in Daily Newspaper Markets?
By Joel Waldfogel and Lisa M. George
-
Product Quality and Market Size
By Steven Berry and Joel Waldfogel
-
Product Quality and Market Size
By Steven Berry and Joel Waldfogel
-
Preference Externalities: An Empirical Study of Who Benefits Whom in Differentiated Product Markets
-
Geography and the Internet: Is the Internet a Substitute or a Complement for Cities?
By Todd M. Sinai and Joel Waldfogel
-
By Steven Berry and Joel Waldfogel
-
Mergers, Station Entry, and Programming Variety in Radio Broadcasting
By Steven Berry and Joel Waldfogel
-
The Adoption of Offset Presses in the Daily Newspaper Industry in the United States