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Oliver Williamson has made fundamental contributions to antitrust economics, going back to 1966 when he was Special Economic Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust in the U.S. Department of Justice. Williamson was ahead of his time. In the intervening years, antitrust law has followed in the direction charted by Williamson.

Competition in the information age often takes the form of a standards war: a battle for market dominance between incompatible technologies. A company's success or failure can easily hinge on its ability to wage such a standards war. Standards wars are especially bitter in markets with strong network effects, where consumers place great value on compatibility and interconnection with each other. These markets tend to exhibit positive feedback and "tip" to a single winner. Based on a study of dozens of standards wars going back over 100 years, this article offers a "battle guide" for waging a standards war. After classifying standards wars and identifying seven key assets that firms can use to successfully establish a new technology, the authors recommend three tactics in standards battles: building alliances, exploiting first-mover advantages, and managing consumer expectations.

In this article, University of California at Berkeley professors Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian explain how a "versioning" strategy can enable a company to distinguish its products from the competition and protect its prices from collapse. This insightful article will be essential reading for any executive competing in the information economy. Many producers of information goods assume that their products are exempt from the economic laws that govern more tangible goods. But that's just not so. Information goods are subject to the same market and competitive forces that govern the fate of any product. And their success, too, hinges on traditional product-management skills: gaining a clear understanding of customer needs, achieving genuine differentiation, and developing and executing an astute positioning and pricing strategy. What makes information goods tricky is their "dangerous economics." Producing the first copy of an information product is often very expensive, but producing subsequent copies is very cheap. In other words, the fixed costs are high and the marginal costs are low. Because competition tends to drive prices to the level of marginal costs, information goods can easily turn into low-priced commodities, making it impossible for companies to recoup their up-front investments and eventually bringing about their demise. The best way to escape that fate, the authors say, is to create different versions of the same core of information by tailoring it to the needs of different customers. The authors draw on a wide range of examples to illustrate how companies use different versioning strategies to appeal to customers with different needs. The power of versioning is that it enables managers to apply tried-and-true product-management techniques in a way that takes into account both the unusual economics of information production and the endless malleability of digital data.