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...

This paper develops and implements a series of tests of costly attention models, in the context of consumer misreaction to opaque prices. We derive a series of predictions about how the sign and magnitude of misreaction varies with stakes. We then test and confirm these predictions in an...

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...

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...

This paper shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis. Focusing on consumer underreaction to not-fully-salient sales taxes, we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in underreaction across individuals and...

We argue that reputation mechanisms used by platform markets suffer from two problems. First, buyers may draw conclusions about the quality of the platform from single transactions, causing a reputational externality across sellers. Second, for a variety of reasons we discuss, reputations will...