We study merger waves in vertically related industries where firms can engage in both vertical and horizontal mergers. Even though any individual merger would have been profitable, firms may refrain from merging for fear of negative impacts from other mergers. When they do merge, however, they...

Social broadcasting networks like Twitter in the U.S. and “Weibo” in China are transforming the way online word-of-mouth is disseminated and consumed in our society. We investigate whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales using publicly available Twitter data and common text mining...

This paper proposes to incorporate product customization in the Maskin and Riley (1984) nonlinear pricing model in order to capture major features of mobile service data. In particular, consumers are characterized by a two-dimensional type. One dimension is observed by the provider and...

We analyse a newspaper market where two editors compete for advertising as well as for readership. They first choose the political position of their newspaper, then set cover prices and advertising tariffs. We build on the work of Gabszewicz, Laussel and Sonnac (2001, 2002), whose model we take...

Traditionally, the value of a product has been assessed according to the direct revenues the product creates. However, products do not exist in isolation but rather influence one another's sales. Such influence is especially evident in eCommerce environments, where products are often presented...

New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the “installed-base” - has a causal effect on current adoption behavior. Estimation of...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

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

This paper uses data from freelancer.com – an online platform that allows employers and freelancers to search for, and match with, each other – to study the effect of freelancers' country of origin on their likelihood to be hired. Having to rely on a relatively small number of...

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...