Platforms refer to intermediaries that facilitate economic interaction between two sets of agents wherein the decisions of one set of agents is likely to have an effect on the other via direct and/or indirect externalities. Given their nature, platforms need to find the appropriate balance...

Healthcare needs have been growing rapidly in many countries as populations age. Recently, ecosystems with online platforms at their center have emerged to address this need. This is because these platforms can scale rapidly, increasing healthcare access and equity. The speed of scaling depends...

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms have become a major engine of growth in Internet commerce. This is especially true in countries such as China, which are experiencing a big rush towards electronic commerce. The emergence of such platforms gives researchers the unique opportunity to...

We empirically examine the effectiveness of referral marketing and price promotion in generating sales in a large e-commerce platform. Our results show that although referral marketing increases sales, its effect is attenuated by price promotion. We argue that price promotion arouses quality...

Online question-and-answer platforms allow consumers to learn different perspectives of information and knowledge from content producers. Such platforms’ performance critically depends on both quantity and variety of knowledge contents generated by the crowd. This paper studies how early-stage...