Dominant digital platforms such as Google and Facebook collect personal information of users by default precipitating a market failure in the market for personal information. We establish the economic harms from the market failure. We discuss conditions for eliminating the market failure and...

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...

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...

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...

We study how net neutrality regulations affect high-bandwidth content providers investment incentives in quality of services (QoS). We find that the effects crucially depend on network capacity levels. With a limited network capacity, the prioritized delivery services are complements to content...

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...

This paper examines price data on over 222 LCD televisions to estimate indirect network effects arising from two sources. First, we conjecture that the disconnect between the timing of when broadcasters are required to convert to an only-digital-signal world and when television manufacturers are...

The concept of a 'global digital divide' is now common, and many cross-country studies of determinants of differences in computer and Internet penetration have been performed. The main conclusions and policy implications from these studies are relatively blunt: get richer, have more telephones,...

Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an...