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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper, we build a theoretical model in which an online hosting platform can develop a copyright filter to screen content that contributors wish to upload. The technology is imprecise, since non-infringing material may be incorrectly filtered out. Once the content is hosted on the...

We study how organizational boundaries affect pricing decisions using comprehensive data provided by a large U.S. airline. We show that contrary to prevailing theories of the firm, advanced pricing algorithms have multiple biases. To quantify the impacts of these biases, we estimate a structural...

We analyze algorithmic pricing on Bol.com, the largest online marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium. Based on more than two months of pricing data for around 2,800 popular products, we find that algorithmic sellers can both increase and reduce the price of the Buy Box (the most prominently...