Investment with network externality under uncertainty

The purpose of this paper is to develop a real option model with a stochastic network size to simultaneously consider firm's investment and household's consumption behaviors in an equilibrium framework. First, the consumer's waiting-to-buy effect is crucial in determining trigger network size of firm's investment. Second, increasing network externality has an ambiguous effect on trigger network size of firm's investment. Third, using NPV rule not only underestimates trigger network size but, also possibly results in the misleading relationship between network externality and trigger network size. ? 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.