In this paper, we build a model of the news market where advertisers allocate their ads between a social media platform and a news website that is the content creator. Our main objective is to evaluate a policy intervention that aims to foster news creation by transferring revenues from social...

We study the effects of competition and interoperabilty in platform markets. To do so, we adopt an approach of competition in net fees, which is well-suited to situations where users pay additional charges, after joining, for on-platform interactions. Compared to other approaches, net fees...

Personal data has become a key input in Internet Commerce, facilitating the matching between millions of customers and merchants. Recent data regulations in China, Europe and US restricts Internet platforms' ability to collect and use personal data for personalized recommendation and may...

We consider a platform that collects data from users. Data has commercial benefit to the platform, personal benefit to the user, and public benefit to other users. We ask whether the platform, or users, should have the right to decide which data the platform commercializes. We find that when...

There is a contentious debate on whether ride-hailing complements or substitutes public transportation. We address this question using novel data and an innovative identification strategy. Our identification strategy relies on exogenous variation in local transit availability caused by rail...

Many products sold on online platforms have additional features. Platforms can deliberately shroud these features from consumers, e.g. by revealing them only late in the purchase process. For example, platforms often reveal shipping- and handling fees, or upgrades like luggage or hotel services...

Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...

With the proliferation of digital social networks and social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, businesses increasingly used referral programs to increase market exposure and sales. We study the interactions between social learning and referral programs and examine their impact on...

Dominant digital platforms such as Google and Facebook collect personal information of users by default precipitating a market failure in the market for personal information. We establish the economic harms from the market failure. We discuss conditions for eliminating the market failure and...

We collect data from Hong Kong’s foremost news media outlets’ Facebook pages from 2019 to 2020 to examine clashes of opinion on the social media platform. We find that specific writing habits signify users’ backgrounds and elicit group segregation cues from readers. An increase in...