Introductory thoughts, and preview of topics discussed in later chapters. For Chapter 2 (Means of Exchange: Ever-present Competition), see https://ssrn.com/abstract=3135028. For Chapter 3 (Platform-based Currencies), see https://ssrn.com/abstract=3135030. For Chapter 4 (Cryptocurrencies), see...

In recent years, ad blocking has become a significant threat to advertising supported publishers. Adblockers typically negotiate with publishers, allowing some ads to go through in return for a payment, a practice called "whitelisting'' in the industry. This paper builds an analytic model to...

We model competition among news providers as a contest where each firm chooses to publish on a topic from a large pool of topics with different prior success probabilities. If a topic is successful, firms that chose to publish on it share a fixed reward. We explore how increased competition (as...