Platform-run marketplaces may exploit third-party sellers' data to develop competing products, but potential for future competition can deter sellers' entry. We explore how this trade-off affects the platform's referral fee and its own entry decision. We first characterize the platform's optimal...

This paper studies the revelation principle for mechanisms with limited commitment when agents have correlated persistent types over the infinite horizon. After characterizing necessary and sufficient conditions to construct a mechanism with same ex-ante payoffs and interim beliefs to all...

We study the welfare effects of a merger between ad-funded platforms facing elastic consumer demand. We show that advertising fees as well as quality investment levels by the platforms fall post-merger. Interestingly, despite the lower advertising fees, advertisers may be worse off when their...

We consider the regulation of a monopoly facing consumers that may evade payments, an important issue in public utilities. To maximize total surplus, the regulator sets the price and socially costly transfers, ensuring that the monopoly breaks-even. With costly effort, the firm can deter...

A monopolist producing vertically differentiated durable goods can offer in each period a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We show that, contrary to the Coase conjecture for the homogeneous durable good monopoly, thanks to the ability to produce differentiated durable...

Using a Markov-perfect equilibrium model, we show that the use of customer data to practice intertemporal price discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U-shaped relationship lends support to a popular view...

We provide the first estimates of the extent of common ownership of competing firms in Australia. Combining data on market shares and substantial shareholdings, we calculate the impact of common ownership on effective market concentration. Among firms where we can identify at least one owner, 31...

A durable good monopolist faces a continuum of heterogeneous customers who make purchase decisions by comparing present and expected price-quality offers. The monopolist designs a sequence of price-quality menus to segment the market. We consider the Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of a game...

A fundamental result in the theory of commodity taxation is that taxes increase consumer prices and reduce supply, aggravating the distortions caused by market power. This result hinges on the assumption that each firm provides a single product. We study the effects of commodity taxes in...

We challenge the dichotomy of network effects and highlight that they are not an exogenous characteristic of networks, but endogenous to the decisions of network users. When users choose which activities to perform in a network, multi-activity users transform indirect into direct network...