This paper examines the effect of competition on product quality when product quality is unobserved before purchase. Using a dataset that records the actual broadband internet speed consumers receive as well as the speed the provider claims is being delivered, I find that an additional broadband...

The growth of the Internet has constrained broadband networks, forcing service providers to search for solutions. We develop a dynamic model of daily usage during peak and non-peak periods, and estimate consumers' price and congestion sensitivity using high frequency usage data. Using the model...

How does strategic investment affect entry of new technologies and market structure? This article investigates the role of competition in firms' technology adoption decisions in the U.S. wireline broadband industry. I present a model of strategic entry deterrence and study how internet service...

Two-sided platforms are typically plagued with asymmetric information, limiting market efficiency. Situated in the context of the increasingly popular online platforms for labor contracting (herein referred to as “online labor markets”), this paper investigates whether the implementation of...

Newspapers' advertising revenues have declined sharply in recent decades. We build a model to investigate the consequences on newspapers' content and prices of a reduction in advertisers' willingness to pay. Newspapers choose the size of their newsroom, and readers are heterogeneous in the...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or un-representative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce someone a platform supplier to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other...

Potential fraud can limit the promise of innovative mobile financial markets like Mobile Money, yet little is known about its existence, especially among the poor. In a randomized control trial across 6 low-income communities in Ghana, I evaluate the extent of fraud — overcharged transactions...

We study the effects of the taxation of digital platforms on the online advertising market. We exploit novel data on daily unit prices of Facebook ads targeted to country-specific audiences, collected around a major change in the firm's accounting practices following the introduction of the UK...

We present an empirical investigation of the role of marketing agencies in Google's online ad auctions. By combining data on advertisers' affiliation to marketing agencies with data on bidding in ad auctions, we analyze how changes in the concentration of clients in the same industry under the...

The growing influence of internet platforms acting as content aggregators is one of the most important challenges facing the media industry. We develop a parsimonious model to understand the impact of content bundling by a social platform. In our model consumers can access news either directly...