This paper studies the competition between firms for influencers in a network. Firms spend effort to convince influencers to recommend their products. The analysis identifies the offensive and defensive roles of spending on influencers. The value of an influencer only depends on the in-degree...

Third-party skill certification is widely used in many markets, online and offline, to address the ubiquitous information asymmetry between workers and employers. In online labor markets, however, the usefulness of third-party certification is not yet fully established in that some leading...

Job erosion is a major concern globally, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment and low wages remain pressing societal challenges in the wake of increased automation, more so for traditionally-disadvantaged groups in the labor market, such as women, minorities, and the elderly....

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...

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...

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...

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...

We study how media bias is affected by the structure of social networks on social media. We consider an ad-financed media firm which chooses the ideological location of its news and targets consumers who can share the news with their followers on an online social media. After studying how a...