The diffusion of social media coincided with a worsening of mental health conditions among adolescents and young adults in the United States, giving rise to speculation that social media might be detrimental to mental health. In this paper, we provide the first quasi-experimental estimates of...

Platforms often display their products ahead of third-party products in search. Is this due to consumers preferring platform-owned products or platforms engaging in self-preferencing by biasing search towards their own products? What are the welfare implications? I develop a structural model of...

Review systems including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences are omnipresent in today’s digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e. unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between...

I investigate the effect of open source on standardization outcomes in a market with positive network externalities. In a closed source world, it seems reasonable to assume that the probability of a standard being chosen is positively correlated with its quality. Open source may weaken or invert...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the explaining factors of the market leadership of two Brazilian companies in specialized fields of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. Whilst Totvs is a software house, dedicated to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) segment...

Do contributions to online content platforms induce a feedback loop of ever more user-generated content or will they discourage future contributions? To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment which added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We find...

The paper reviews the evidence on the challenges of digitalization for direct (corporate profit) and indirect (consumption) taxation. Based on both anecdotal and empirical evidence, we evaluate ongoing developments at the OECD and European Union level and argue that there is no justification for...

We analyze platform competition where user data is collected to improve adtargeting. Considering that users incur privacy costs, we show that the equilibrium level of data provision is distorted and can be inefficiently high or low: if overall competition is weak or if targeting benefits are...

How important is Google for scientific research? This paper exploits the exogenous shock represented by Google's sudden withdrawal of its services from mainland China to assess the importance of access to information for the knowledge production function of scientific scholars in the field of...

Smartphone app designers often use behavioral design to influence users, increase sales, and boost advertising revenue. Behavioral design relies on elements ranging from app appearance to black-box algorithms and personalization. It commonly exploits behavioral biases, such as the lack of...