Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

In the context of interwar Poland, we find that Jews tended to be more literate than non-Jews, but show that this finding is driven by a composition effect. In particular, most Jews lived in cities and most non-Jews lived in rural areas, and people in cities were more educated than people in...

A major result in the study of two-sided platforms is the strategic interdependence between the two sides of the same platform, leading to the implication that a platform can maximize its total profits by subsidizing one of its sides. We show that this result largely depends on assuming that at...

Since its launch in 2009 much has been written about Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and blockchains. While the discussions initially took place mostly on blogs and other popular media, we now are witnessing the emergence of a growing body of rigorous academic research on these topics. By the nature...

We analyze how network effects affect competition in the nascent cryptocurrency market. We do so by examining the changes over time in exchange rate data among cryptocurrencies. Specifically, we look at two aspects: (1) competition among different currencies, and (2) competition among exchanges...

Given technological advances and the widespread use of the Internet, various digital currencies have emerged. In most cases, Internet platforms such as Facebook and Amazon restrict the functionality of their digital currencies to enhance the business model and maximize their profits. While...

We study the effect of different levels of information on two-sided platform profits| under monopoly and competition. One side (developers) is always informed about all prices and therefore forms responsive expectations. In contrast, we allow the other side (users) to be uninformed about prices...

This paper considers a dynamic platform competition in a market with network externalities. We ask two research questions. The first one asks how the beliefs advantage carries over in time, and whether a low-quality platform can maintain its focal position along time. We show that for very high...