We evaluate the extent to which small businesses maintain an online presence, looking at restaurant listings on a major online review platform. While the majority of restaurants have an online presence, we find that roughly 18 percent in our sample have no presence as of the end of 2017, despite...

A central prediction of information economics is that market forces can lead businesses to voluntarily provide information about the quality of their products, yet little voluntary disclosure is observed in the field. In this paper, we demonstrate that the inconsistency between theory and...

We empirically analyze disclosure decisions made by 240 MBA programs about which rankings to display on their websites. We present three main findings. First, consistent with theories of countersignaling, top schools are least likely to disclose their rankings, whereas mid-ranked schools are...

Consumer review websites leverage the wisdom of the crowd, with each product being reviewed many times (some with more than 1,000 reviews). Because of this, the way in which information is aggregated is a central decision faced by consumer review websites. Given a set of reviews, what is the...

This paper studies how land reform and population growth affect land inequality and landlessness, focusing particularly on indirect effects owing to their influence on household divisions and land market transactions. Theoretical predictions of a model of household division and land transactions...

This paper investigates the determinants of expert reviews in the book industry. Reviews are determined not only by the quality of the product but also by the incentives of the media outlet providing the review. For example, a media outlet may have the incentive to provide favorable coverage to...

This chapter documents what economists have learned about user-generated content (UGC) and social media. A growing body of evidence suggests that UGC on platforms ranging from Yelp to Facebook has a large causal impact on economic and social outcomes ranging from restaurant decisions to voting...