This paper considers options for the UK Government's intended White Paper on online harms and safety. The report, which was funded by Sky, suggests that legislation should establish a framework for oversight and accountability of online platforms' handling of harmful and illegal content. Bunting...

This article reports on an investigation of the role of lock-in exploitation and the impact of reputation portability on workers’ switching behaviors in online labor markets. Online platforms using reputation mechanisms typically prevent users from transferring their ratings to other...

This article presents and analyses the results of a large-scale empirical study in which over 11,000 consumers from ten countries in five continents were surveyed about their use, perceptions and understanding of online platform services. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first...

The paper applies economic theories to give an overview of the emerging phenomenon of digital personal assistants (DPAs). A DPA is an intelligent automated system that interacts with the user through a dialogue in natural language, and meanwhile applying third-party services to obtain...

This paper describes the different forces that shape the market structure of four different "online platform ecosystems" and the competition between them. The paper focuses on the following categories of platforms, which represent a wide scope of online activities: (i) e-commerce marketplaces;...

This report presents evidence on the relationship between online platforms and businesses using these platforms to reach consumers or conduct their operations. First, we review the literature on vertical relationships both from a classic approach and from a multi-sided market perspective....

International trade is subject to information incompleteness. Firms must therefore engage in a costly search process to find business partners. Online platforms can reduce these search costs and thereby favor firms exports. We examine whether this is actually the case and the underlying...

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...

In this paper, we build a theoretical model in which an online hosting platform can develop a copyright filter to screen content that contributors wish to upload. The technology is imprecise, since non-infringing material may be incorrectly filtered out. Once the content is hosted on the...