As economists with significant experience in competition, telecommunications, and regulatory matters, we have filed the attached brief in the case of State of New York v. Deutsche Telecom supporting the plaintiffs, who have sued to prevent the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. We explain why the...

How should market designers tradeoff competition and specificity? We study a natural experiment in the release of new advertising targeting technology. The platform in our study introduced targeting into select geographic markets using a regression discontinuity. We find that advertisers use new...

In this paper, we investigate optimal pricing strategies for an online grocery retailer that derives its profits from delivery fees and grocery sales. We base our theoretical framework on the well-established work of Schmalensee (1981) in two-part pricing, while allowing for repeat purchase...

The U.S. spectrum licenses cover geographically distinct areas and are often complementary to each other. A bidder seeking to acquire multiple licenses is then exposed to risks of winning only isolated patches. To allocate licenses more efficiently, the Federal Communications Commission allowed...

The aim of this research is to analyze whether and when ratings are informative signals about the quality of movies. The ratings data of Netflix is used to fit a structural Bayesian learning model. This model links revealed experience utilities of raters, previous consumers, to the product...

Consumer ratings have become a prevalent driver of choice. I develop a model of social learning in which ratings can inform consumers about both product quality and their idiosyncratic taste for them. Depending on consumers' prior knowledge, I show that ratings relatively advantage lower quality...

Darknet markets have been increasingly used for the transaction of illegal products and services in the last decade. In particular, it is estimated that drugs make up two-thirds of darknet market transactions. The growth of illicit transactions on darknet markets have led enforcement agencies to...

This paper examines how online content providers monetize their content when the residing platform gives them full pricing autonomy and allows referral program for their audience acquisition. By using unique data from a popular Chinese content provision platform, we use a structural approach to...

"Brushing"---online merchants placing fake orders of their own products---has been a growing phenomenon on major e-commerce platforms. On the one hand, brushing enables merchants to boost their rankings in search results, because products with higher sales volume are often ranked higher. On the...

This paper evaluates whether competition hinders or spurs investment in a network industry. When a network is split between competitors, potential network effects are foregone. However, a firm may invest in components that are not shared, to steal customers from its competitors. I structurally...