One key objective of matching platforms is to facilitate market clearing. When the supply and demand for services are unbalanced, congestion issues arise. Specifically, when workers can apply for unlimited employers/jobs with negligible application costs, employers may face excessive...

Feedback scores in an online marketplace have risen sharply over time, leading to substantial top-censoring. Some of the increase is explained by more satisfied raters, but at least 35-45% is attributable to raters applying lower standards. We show that this "reputation inflation" is the...

A common issue in online dating platforms is that many users focus their attention on a subset of popular peers, which leads to congestion and thus lower matching rates. Our study examines the results of a randomized natural field experiment, wherein our corporate partner, a large online dating...

When product or service quality cannot be well-specified ex-ante because of uncertainty and information asymmetry, consumer surplus (CS) is not well-defined or known ex-ante. Traditional measures of CS have implicitly assumed that the quality expected is the same as the quality that is paid for....

Piracy has been a major problem for perpetually licensed software. Usage-based licensing architecture such as pay-per-use or software-as-a-service can offer technology-based protection against piracy. We provide an analytical framework to examine the economic implications of pay-per-use versus...

Online reviews and ratings help consumers learn more about products. However, mixed findings have been found regarding the effects of ratings on consumer decision-making. Such lack of effect may be due to the limitation of single-dimensional ratings. This paper aims to explore whether...