It has been conjectured that the peer-based recommendations associated with electronic commerce lead to a redistribution of demand from popular products or "blockbusters" to less popular or "niche" products, and that electronic markets will therefore be characterized by a "long tail" of demand...

We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users' propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users' social ties on the network have a causal effect on their...

This paper proposes a revealed preference test of network formation models. Specifically, I consider network formation models where agents are (1) strategic, (2) externalities are confined to within an agent’s k-neighborhood, where k can be varied. I show that this model can be tested...

In this paper, I develop and estimate a dynamic model of strategic network formation with heterogeneous agents. The main theoretical result is the existence of a unique stationary equilibrium, which characterizes the probability of observing a specific network in the data. As a consequence, the...

In this paper, we examine how a seller sells a product/service with a positive consumption externality, and customers are uncertain about the product's/service's value. Because early adopters learn this value, we consider the customers' intrinsic signaling incentives and positive feedback...

Ballester, Calvo-Armengol, and Zenou (2006, Econometrica, 74/5, pp. 1403-17) show that in a network game with local payoff complementarities, together with global uniform payoff substitutability and own concavity effects, the intercentrality measure identifies the key player - a player who, once...

We develop a model of dynamic platform formation under positive platform externalities. Users can switch between an incumbent and entrant platforms, switching opportunities arise stochastically and users can choose whether to accept or reject an opportunity to switch. For homogeneous users, we...

Abstract I model dynamic product design along price and non-price dimensions by a firm in a market with positive network externalities between consumers. In the case of a usage fee, I provide conditions under which the steady state (SS) is unique and show that the introductory price is negative...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in group size as a...

A key property of the World Wide Web is the possibility for firms to place virtually costless links to third-party content as a substitute or complement to their own content. This ability to hyperlink has enabled new types of players, such as search engines and content aggregators, to...