This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on...

We study duopoly pricing in the market for mobile phone service, which features network externalities, switching costs, and consumer heterogeneity. We introduce a steady state approach that enables a tractable analysis without endgame effects. The model can generate a variety of testable...

I generalize the workhorse model of network competition (Armstrong, 1998; Laffont, Rey and Tirole, 1998a,b) to include income effects in call demand. Income effects imply that call demand depends also on the subscription fee, not only on the call price. In the standard case of differentiated...

In this paper, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of strategic network formation with heterogeneous agents. The main theoretical result is the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium, which characterizes the probability of observing a specific network in the data. As a consequence, the...

We analyze how termination charges a ect retail prices when taking into account that receivers derive some utility from a call and when rms may charge consumers for receiving calls. A novel feature of our paper is that we consider passive self-ful lling expectations and do not allow for negative...

We estimate a dynamic oligopoly entry game in the early U.S. local telephone market. We observe the identities of potential entrants into local markets and therefore the waiting time of each potential entrant before it commits actual entry. To capture the feature of the data, we allow firms to...

This paper investigates how switching costs affect product compatibility and market dynamics in network industries. A reduction in the switching cost makes the firms' products more attractive relative to the outside good, which diminishes the market expansion benefit of making products...

To study how economic fundamentals affect the formation of social networks, a model is needed that (i) has agents responding rationally to incentives (ii) can be taken to the data. This paper combines game-theoretic and statistical approaches to network formation in order to develop such a...

Perhaps the most striking feature of "crowdfunding'' is the broad geographic dispersion of investors. This contrasts with existing theories that predict entrepreneurs and investors will be co-located due to distance-sensitive costs. We examine a crowdfunding setting that connects...

Consumer adoption and usage of mobile Internet-based content services has been growing steadily over the past few years in many countries around the world. In this paper, we develop and estimate a dynamic structural model of user behavior and learning with regard to content generation and usage...