Platforms operators act as private regulators to increase usage and maximize profits. Their goals depend on the development of the platform: overcoming the chicken-egg problem early on requires attracting platform participants while quality becomes more important later on. Private regulators...

The insight that it is the medium that affects a society and not the content which is delivered over that medium, is not new by far, thus "the medium is the message" (McLuhan 1967). In contemporary industrial societies, the share of user-generated information consumed everyday over the internet...

Changes in communication technology have allowed for the expansion of data collection modes in survey research. The proliferation of the computer has allowed the creation of web and computer assisted auto-interview data collection modes. Virtual worlds are a new application of computer...

Die Video-Plattform Youtube ist eine der meistbesuchten Webseiten weltweit. Youtube-Stars erreichen mit ihren Videos große Zuschauergruppen und können als Multiplikatoren für Werbebotschaften dienen. Sie sind oftmals Meinungsführer, denen hohes Vertrauen entgegengebracht wird, weshalb sie...

Climate change is one of the greatest market failures of our time. This thesis consists of three essays in which we study the economics of climate change using networks as a theoretical framework. In the first essay, we discover flaws in the foundations of a recent strand of literature...

This dissertation presents the design, development and evaluation of the Social Set Visualizer, an innovative Visual Analytics software tool, that expands upon a novel set-based approach to Big Social Data Analytics for large-scale datasets from social media platforms such as Facebook. Over the...

Seit Ausbruch der Corona-Pandemie haben sich in den sozialen Medien verschiedenste Verschwörungserzählungen ausgebreitet. Weiterhin werden traditionelle Medien im Allgemeinen stärker genutzt und als deutlich glaubwürdiger eingeschätzt als soziale Medien. Dies zeigt eine Auswertung der im...

The diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to speculation that social media might be detrimental to mental health. In this paper, we provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of...

We study why high-priced acquisitions of entrants by an incumbent do not necessarily stimulate more innovation and entry in an industry (like that of digital platforms) where customers face switching costs and enjoy network externalities. The prospect of an acquisition by the incumbent platform...

[Introduction:] The route to customers is becoming increasingly digital, for any business. There is hardly any business that is not focussing on reaching customers online. The Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated this trend. In many markets, digital platforms have become essential tools for...