This paper studies a 'market creating' firm (platform) that offers a matching environment by charging an access fee to a population of high and low type users who wish to form a match. We focus on an environment where users only observe a signal of their randomly assigned partner's type and...

This paper uses a randomized experiment to study whether social networks affect vote choice. In a fiercely contested presidential election in Peru with ten candidates, only 35% of subjects were aware how their friends intended to vote. We compare people who were randomly informed how one of...

We examine the effects of mobile termination rate regulation in asymmetric oligopolies. We do this by extending existing models of asymmetric duopoly and symmetric oligopoly where consumer expectations about market shares are passive. We first calibrate product differentiation parameters using...

In this paper we study the implications of service level guarantees (SLGs) in a model of oligopoly competition where providers compete to deliver a service to congestion-sensitive consumers. The SLG is a contractual obligation on the part of the service provider: regardless of how many customers...

Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household-level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of...

In Electronic Payment Networks (EPNs) the No-Surcharge Rule (NSR) requires that merchants charge the same final good price regardless of the means of payment chosen by the customer. In this paper, we analyze a three-party model (consumers, merchants, and proprietary EPNs) to assess the impact of...

This paper investigates the importance of network effects in the demand for ethanol-compatible vehicles and the supply of ethanol fuel retailers. An indirect network effect, or positive feedback loop, arises in this context due to spatially-dependent complementarities in the availability of...

I develop a framework to explain why identity divides some communities and not others. An identity group is defined as a group of individuals with the same `culture'. A community is divided when different identities are socially segregated; a community is integrated when there is no social...

We develop a structural econometric framework that allows us to simulate the effects of mergers among two-sided platforms selling differentiated products. We apply the proposed methodology to the Dutch newspaper industry. Our structural model encompasses demands for differentiated products on...