This paper examines the effect of competition on product quality when product quality is unobserved before purchase. Using a dataset that records the actual broadband internet speed consumers receive as well as the speed the provider claims is being delivered, I find that an additional broadband...

We empirically study how to seed products in a network in the presence of peer effects from both friends and strangers. The product adoption decisions of friends and strangers can both strongly influence consumers' purchase behaviour, but their importance relative to each other is unknown. We...

Do firms respond to cost shocks by reducing the quality of their products? Using microdata from a large Russian retailer that refreshes its product line twice-yearly, we document that higher quality products are more profitable than lower quality ones, but that the number of high quality...

Covid-19 has sparked substantial growth in direct-to-consumer telemedicine (DCT) provision, intensifying healthcare competition by expanding patient choice sets. I analyze the causal effect of new DCT entrants on incumbent healthcare providers, leveraging quasi-experimental variation in market...

Public policies that intervene or restrict consumer choices for the benefit of the society are often controversial. For instance, the compliance rate of COVID-19 pandemic social distancing rules varied dramatically across cities and states, and these policies even backfired among some consumers...