The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

In this paper, we study how the presence of a news aggregator affects competition among (horizontally differentiated) newspapers in the Internet. For this purpose, we build a model of multiple issues which allows each newspaper to choose quality on each issue. Our model provides a micro...

This paper investigates the price war in the UK quality newspaper industry in the 1990s. We build a model of the newspaper market which encompasses demand for differentiated products on both, the readers and advertisers side of the market, and profit maximization by four competing oligopolistic...

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on...

Increasingly sophisticated tracking technology offers publishers the ability to offer targeted advertisements to advertisers. Such targeting enhances advertising efficiency by improving the match quality between advertisers and users, but also thins the market of interested advertisers. Using...

Imbalances in supply and demand often cause the price for the same good to vary across geographic locations. Economic theory suggests that if the price differential is greater than the cost of transporting the good between locations, then buyers will shift demand from high-price locations to...

The literature on information aggregation predicts that market growth unambiguously reduces uncertainty about the value of traded goods. The results were developed within the classical model, which assumes that traders’ values for the exchanged good are determined by fundamental (common)...

As auctions are becoming the main mechanism for selling advertisement space on the web, marketing agencies specialized in bidding in online auctions are proliferating. We analyze theoretically how bidding delegation to a common marketing agency can undermine both revenues and efficiency of the...

This paper studies the competition between firms for influencers in a network. Firms spend effort to convince influencers to recommend their products. The analysis identifies the offensive and defensive roles of spending on influencers. The value of an influencer only depends on the in-degree...