Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that the composition of the platform's 'beta testers' on the day a new product is launched has a systematic and persistent impact on the venture's success. Specifically, we use word embedding methods to...

This study provides a structural analysis of detailed, alternating-offer bargaining data from eBay, deriving bounds on buyers and sellers private value distributions using a range of assumptions on behavior. These assumptions range from very weak (assuming only that acceptance and rejection...

We use U.S. eBay data to investigate how trade is influenced by differences in socioeconomic characteristics, tastes, and trust. States' similarity in cultural characteristics (ethnicity, religious affiliations, and political behavior) is predictive of online trade; cultural similarity similarly...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

A central issue in privacy governance is understanding how users balance their privacy preferences and data sharing to satisfy service demands. We combine survey and behavioral data of a sample of Alipay users to examine how data privacy preferences affect their data sharing with third-party...

A growing body of empirical literature finds that consumers are relatively limited in how much they search over product characteristics. We assemble a dataset of search and purchase behavior from eBay to quantify the returns, and thus implied costs, to consumer search on the internet. The...