Online media platforms have the characteristics of a particular type of market known as 'multi-sided'. These businesses create value by bringing advertisers and users together. Access to user data is critical to this process. On the basis of economic literature, the features of multi-sided...

Following the Internet’s widespread adoption, much economic work has studied ‘online platforms’: firms that mainly interact with consumers in cyberspace. This article surveys such work, focusing on the ways in which traditional economic models have been adapted to incorporate...

Lately, a new trend has specially outreached on the Information Society that of Social Computing. Starting from a citizen-focused model of health seamless provision of services, this paper analyses some current Web 2.0 initiatives on the Health sector. These opportunities would not be fully...

The purpose of this paper is to present and validate a model of factors influencing the customers' satisfaction on internet shopping in China. To attain these, a questionnaire was sent to 300 potential Chinese customers. The findings indicate that there are 15 items that influence consumer...

This paper presents the results of an empirical study of price dispersion in homogenous goods markets. Modern economic theory suggests that markets will inevitably have information asymmetries resulting in equilibriums with price dispersion even when goods are perfectly homogenous. Earlier...

El objetivo del presente trabajo es analizar los factores que influyen en el uso de buscadores y su incidencia en el comportamiento de compra en Internet. El análisis de resultados obtenidos a partir de una muestra representativa de 485 compradores por Internet españoles, pone de manifiesto...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique panel dataset of several hundred...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising--where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (nonsponsored) Web search results--is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique six-month panel data set of several...

The phenomenon of paid search advertising has now become the most predominant form of online advertising in the marketing world. However, we have little understanding of the impact of search engine advertising on consumers' responses in the presence of organic listings of the same firms. In this...

L'introduzione delle reti di accesso di nuova generazione rappresenta un cambiamento epocale, che potrebbe cambiare radicalmente sia le possibilità di comunicazione di milioni di famiglie, sia le modalità operative delle attività commerciali. Sul piano regolamentare, l'introduzione delle reti...