We are grateful for all the positive feedback from researchers, students and practitioners. In particular, we are very happy that our book is widely adopted in IO courses at the master's level and has also proved useful in many advanced bachelor as well as Ph.D. courses.
The publisher provided us with a number of anonymous reviews, which contained suggestions on how to improve the book further, in particular with regard to reader-friendliness. We are grateful for the efforts by these researchers.
The second edition keeps the same order of chapters. However, compared with the first edition, we have made two important expositional changes.
First, at the end of each chapter we provide several exercises. Solutions to these exercises can be found at the end of the book. (As in the first edition, the textbook website contains additional exercises. Solutions to most exercises are available to instructors. We also continue to make slides for each chapter available on the textbook website.)
Second, to improve the ease of use, endnotes of the first edition now appear as grey footnotes. Thus, we now have two types of footnote. Those in black contain additional information that helps the understanding. Footnotes in grey provide references and occasionally technical remarks. References are collected at the end of each part. We have thoroughly revised the content of the book; in addition to some corrections, we have shortened some expositions and added additional material (cases, formal models and verbal expositions) in several chapters. We want to mention two instances where we have reorganized content across chapters. First, the formal analysis of customer poaching has been moved to the section on behaviour-based price discrimination in Chapter 10. Second, some of the material in Chapters 18 and 19 has been reshuffled and expanded (e.g., the analysis of patent licensing and the comparison of patents, secrets and rewards as incentive mechanisms for innovation).
We want to say thank you to a large number of researchers. In addition to the people we thanked in the first edition, some of whom provided additional comments and suggestions for the second edition, we would like to thank Olivier Bonroy (Grenoble), Daniel Halbheer (St. Gallen), Paco Martinez-Sanchez (Murcia), Michele Polo (Bocconi), Eva-Maria Scholz (Louvain-la-Neuve), Florian Schuett (Tilburg) and ChengsiWang (Mannheim). Apologies to those who also provided useful input but whose names got lost.