Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve ad-targeting. Considering that users incur privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are...

We study a platform's design of membership and transaction fees when sellers compete and buyers cannot observe the prices and features of goods without incurring search costs. The platform alleviates sellers' competition by charging them transaction fees that increase with sales revenue, and...

We analyze competing strategic platforms setting fees to a local monopolist merchant and granting cash-back rebates to end users, when the merchant is prevented from surcharging platforms customers, as frequently occurs with credit cards. Each platform has an incentive to gain transactions by...

We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve adtargeting. Considering that users incur privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are...

I appreciate the opportunity to submit observations on the Statement of Scope (“SOS”) of the Market Study on “Online Platforms and Digital Advertising”. This Market Study is welcome given the importance of digital advertising for online content providers (which I will refer to as...

Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to websites, Yet, if consumers dislike that websites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between websites that can show targeted advertisements. We find that...

In this paper, we address how targeting and consumer multi-homing impact platform competition and market equilibria in two-sided markets. We analyze platforms that are financed by both advertising and subscription fees, and let them adopt a targeting technology with increasing performance in...

This paper presents a model of second-degree price discrimination by a monopolistic seller who offers a menu of price-quantity pair contracts to consumers located in a social network. Network effects are local as consumers' private valuations are increasing in their friends' adoption decisions....

We present a model of dynamic monopoly pricing for a good that displays network effects. In contrast with the standard notion of a rational-expectations equilibrium, we model consumers as boundedly rational, and unable either to pay immediate attention to each price change, or to make accurate...