Sellers sometimes offer goods for sale under both a regular price and a discount for group purchase if the consumer group reaches some minimum size. This selling practice, which we term interpersonal bundling, has been popularized on the Internet by companies such as Groupon. We explain why...

Many firms have introduced internet-based customer self-service applications, such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial signup rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multi-stage nature of the adoption process (an...

Social broadcasting networks like Twitter in the U.S. and “Weibo” in China are transforming the way online word-of-mouth is disseminated and consumed in our society. We investigate whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales using publicly available Twitter data and common text mining...

This paper considers the joint creation and consumption of content on user generated content platforms (e.g., reviews or articles, chat, videos, etc.). On these platforms, users' utilities depend upon the participation of others; hence, users' expectations regarding the participation of others...

We study price discrimination by a monopoly two-sided platform who mediates interactions between two different groups of agents. We adapt a canonical model of second degree price discrimination a la Mussa and Rosen (1978) to a two-sided platform by focusing on non-responsiveness, a clash between...

This paper empirically investigates the effect of international simple resale (ISR) authorization on the prices for international message telephone service (IMTS). We compile a firm-level panel data set for over 200 United States-foreign country bilateral markets from 1995 to 2004. These data...

When platforms compete for consumers, two types of consumer heterogeneity will matter: consumers value the presence of other consumers on a platform differently, and consumers contribute to the value of the platform differently. The optimal discriminatory pricing policy for platforms will depend...

How much are we influenced by an author's identity? If identity matters, is it because we have a "taste for status" or because it offers a useful shortcut - a signal that is correlated with the likely importance of their ideas? This paper presents evidence from a natural experiment that took...

In many industries, consumers rely on recommendations by an intermediary when choosing between competing products. In this paper, we look at how the existence of contracts between firms and intermediaries affects the quality of the advice received by consumers, and firms' incentives to invest in...

The vast majority of US residential consumers face a monopoly or duopoly in broadband Internet access. Up to now, the Internet was characterizedby a regime of 'net neutrality' where there was no discrimination in theprice of a transmitted information packet based on the identities ofeither the...