We study consumer response towards sponsored search advertising and how to improve advertising performance on a large e-commerce platform. Our research design is based on a field experiment which randomizes the salience of ad disclosure to consumers, and a natural experiment which eradicates a...

Search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of an information problem: new products typically do not have enough sales or other user-engagement that enables platforms to reliably assess product quality. This paper evaluates...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

I address the degree to which variation in exposure to e-commerce is associated with entry and exit in the retail industry at the county level. To measure exposure to e-commmerce, I rely on within-state variation in relative search frequency for the phrase “amazon prime” as reported by...

Consider a retailer using sponsored search marketing together with dynamic pricing. The retailer’s bid on a search keyword affects the retailer’s rank among the search results. The higher the rank, the higher the customer traffic and the customers’ willingness-to-pay will be. Thus, the...

We study the optimal algorithm decisions of a platform on ranking products sold by sellers--who may use fake sales to boost the rankings of their products--and the impact on consumers and sellers. We design a model of an online retail marketplace with competing sellers. The platform decides...

This paper summarizes the peculiarities of online markets and discusses recent antitrust cases related to online markets. Following a brief description of the online markets' characteristics and potential tendencies for concentration the paper first discusses the antitrust allegations and...

This report provides an overview of the relevant economic research literature on platforms or multi-sided online markets. It discusses platforms from a regulatory policy angle, including potential market failures in platforms, the extent of self-regulation and possible regulatory responses...