A lack of platform-level competition among digital marketplaces can result in socially inefficient platform design and meaningful welfare losses, even independent of actively anticompetitive behavior. To illustrate the first-order effects platform design can have on competitive outcomes, I...

Digital platforms sometimes offer incentives to a subset of sellers to nudge behavior, possibly affecting the behavior of all sellers in the equilibrium. In this paper, we study a policy change on a large e-commerce platform that offers financial incentives only to platform-certified sellers...

We consider a streaming platform which carries content from various upstream content providers. Participating customers face personalized recommendations from the platform and consume a mix of content originating from each provider. We analyze when the platform uses its personalized...

Public authorities in many jurisdictions are concerned about the proliferation of illegal content and products on online platforms. In this paper, we provide an economic appraisal of platform liability that highlights the effects of a stricter liability rule on several key variables such as...

Platform interoperability is considered a powerful tool to promote competition in digital markets when network effects are at play. We study the effect of interoperability on competition between two ad-financed platforms, allowing for endogenous multi-homing of consumers. When the platforms are...

This paper explores the relationship between market accessibility and various participants’ welfare in an intermediated directed-search market. For a general class of meeting technologies, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which efficiency requires imperfect accessibility,...

This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition...

This paper analyzes taxation of an Internet platform attracting users from different jurisdictions. When corporate income tax rates are different in the two jurisdictions, the platform distorts prices and outputs in order to shift profit to the low-tax country. We analyze the comparative statics...

We study the effects of a voluntary skill certification scheme in an online freelancing labour market. We show that obtaining skill certificates increases freelancers' earnings. This effect is not driven by increased freelancer productivity but by decreased employer uncertainty. The increase in...

Thanks to algorithmic management, the digital platform sector does not require sophisticated governance structures and labour intensity tends to be higher than in traditional sectors. So, why aren’t usually digital labour platforms worker cooperatives? We develop a simple model to study...