The ubiquitous process of digitization changes economic competition on markets in several ways and leads to the emergence of new business models. The increasing roles of digital platforms as well as data-driven markets represent two relevant examples. These developments challenge competition...

Tech giants are commonly referred to as ‘platforms’ in our everyday language and academic circles. Some refer to ‘the platform economy’, or the ‘platformization of the Web’. But our legal language requires more nuance as putting all these companies in the same basket has significant...

There is vigorous debate over the ability of the current antitrust enforcement regime in the United States to protect against potential reductions in competition caused by large technology companies. Some commentators have argued that current antitrust rules and processes cannot address...

We consider a streaming platform which carries content from various upstream content providers. Participating customers face personalized recommendations from the platform and consume a mix of content originating from each provider. We analyze when the platform uses its personalized...

This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

Market power on each side of a multisided platform, whether in the form of increasing prices or decreasing quality, is constrained by the risk of losing sales on the other sides. That tends to weaken market power on each side and encourages platforms to keep prices lower and quality higher than...

Despite widespread use in online transactions, rating systems only provide summary statistics of buyers' diverse opinions at best. To investigate the consequences of this coarse form of information aggregation, we consider a dynamic lemons market in which buyers share their evaluations...

Online retailing is dominated by a channel structure in which a retailer either buys products from competing manufacturers and resells to consumers (wholesale scheme) or lets manufacturers directly sell to consumers on its platform for a commission (platform scheme). Easy access to publicly...