As the collection of consumer data becomes more common, online merchants are better equipped to price discriminate now more than ever before. While the standard use of first-degree price discrimination benefits merchants and harms consumers relative to uniform pricing, I derive an alternative...

We examine the impact of peer-to-peer (P2P) short-term rentals on housing affordability. Using a simple model we illustrate that, although growth in the short-term rental market leads to higher housing prices, home-sharing profits can offset increased housing costs. That is, we show the net...

Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...

We challenge the dichotomy of network effects and highlight that they are not an exogenous characteristic of networks, but endogenous to the decisions of network users. When users choose which activities to perform in a network, multi-activity users transform indirect into direct network...

The phenomenon where a network's value escalates with each additional user, known as a direct network effect, exists across industries that may differ in terms of interoperability or compatibility. For instance, while email and telephone services benefit from seamless cross-network...

This paper investigates the impact of price transparency on equilibrium prices and fees by considering a policy change implemented by Airbnb that affected the transparency of cleaning fees for IP addresses from the European Union (EU). Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find a...

Consumer multi-homing is considered to be critical for competition policy regarding digital platforms. To assess the role of consumer multi-homing in competition policy toward platforms, we develop a new framework that embeds consumer multi-homing in two-sided market into the otherwise standard...

We develop a model for two-sided markets with consumers and producers, who interact through a platform. Typical settings for the model are the market for smartphones with phone users, app producers, and smartphone operating systems; or the video game market with game players, video game...

In two-sided markets a platform allows consumers and sellers to interact by creating sub-markets within the platform marketplace. For example, Amazon has sub-markets for all of the different product categories available on its site, and smartphones have sub-markets for different types of...