We study the black market for car license plates in Beijing. Black market transactions are unobserved. However, using comprehensive car sales data and an identification strategy based on optimal transport ideas, we can estimate a lower bound for the size of the black market. We find that at...

Groupon pioneered a new business model which combines the features of daily deals and group buying. This so-called social coupon industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years. In this paper, utilizing a large proprietary dataset of Groupon users, the authors develop three hypotheses...

This study examines how network structure and dynamics interplay with the effect of social influence to facilitate diffusion. The context we consider is the diffusion of a new smartphone from a major wireless carrier in two medium-sized cities in China. The study is carried out in three stages:...

We study consumers' purchase behavior on daily deal websites (e.g., Groupon promotions) using individual clickstream data on the browsing history of new subscribers to Groupon between January and March 2011. We observe two patterns in the data. First, the probability that a given consumer clicks...

We collect data from Hong Kong’s foremost news media outlets’ Facebook pages from 2019 to 2020 to examine clashes of opinion on the social media platform. We find that specific writing habits signify users’ backgrounds and elicit group segregation cues from readers. An increase in...

Black markets can reduce the effects of distortionary regulations by reallocating scarce resources towards those who value them the most. The illegal nature of black markets however creates transaction costs that reduce the gains from trade. We take a partial identification approach to infer...