An increasing proportion of transactions in two-sided markets are being mediated by online platforms. Presumably, agents choose to use online platforms because they have a lower transaction cost technology compared to alternatives. I use data from a growing online platform that matches travelers...

Understanding the process of software adoption is of paramount importance to software start-ups. We study a monopolistic seller’s optimal consumer network structure formation (seeding, segmentation, sequencing, and pricing strategies) under network effects. We demonstrate the importance of...

We analyze the linking and versioning strategies of a media firm when facing competition from blogs, search engines and news aggregators. First, we show that when the publisher competes against a blog it is less likely to release a “fighting version” if this generates significant spillovers...

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...

The purpose of this research is to determine whether Internet telephony has had a negative impact on a country’s telecommunications infrastructure. Using panel data the statistical analysis shows that call-back did not have a negative effect on infrastructure and high income countries...

The YouTube platform reduces fixed entry costs for local artists but also lowers the cost of access to international superstars. The net effect is an empirical question. We study the effect of YouTube on the market for music, focusing on converging tastes for international hits. We consider...

We investigate how the expansion of Craigslist into different states over a 11 year period in the United States affected the incidence of HIV. Using a natural experiment setup, we identify the effects of Craigslist's entry on HIV trends by exploiting the variations across states and time. After...

The success of the Kindle e-book platform and the increased popularity of e-books among members of the reading community have attracted extensive interest in the high-tech industry. New platform providers are jumping in the market to compete for device and e-book sales. In this paper, we model...

Consumer review systems have become an important marketing communication tool through which consumers share and learn product information. Although there is abundant evidence that consumer reviews have significant impact on consumer purchasing decisions, the design of consumer review systems and...

We study the online contagion of exogenous demand shocks generated by book reviews featured on the Oprah Winfrey TV show and published in the New York Times, through the co-purchase recommendation network on Amazon.com. These exogenous events may ripple through and affect the demand for a...