Digitization has drastically lowered the costs of replicating and distributing music, enabling piracy on the demand side, as well as supply side re-use and recontextualization. This paper examines cumulative creativity and re-use through the release of derivative works in the popular music...

This paper uses data from freelancer.com – an online platform that allows employers and freelancers to search for, and match with, each other – to study the effect of freelancers' country of origin on their likelihood to be hired. Having to rely on a relatively small number of...

I examine the role of word of mouth in consumer's product discovery process and its implications for the firm. A monopolist supplies an assortment of horizontally differentiated products and consumers search for a product that matches their taste by sampling products from the assortment or by...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc. demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...

In their seminal 1985 paper, Katz and Shapiro study systems compatibility in settings with one-sided platforms and direct network externalities. We consider systems compatibility when competing platforms are two-sided and there are indirect network externalities to develop an explanation why...

I study the impact of consumer reviews on the incentives for firms to participate in the market. Firms produce goods of heterogeneous, unknown quality that is gradually revealed via consumer reviews, and face both entry and exit decisions. A platform combines past reviews to construct...

How has the Internet affected newspaper content? We build a dataset that matches newspaper readability measures to Internet penetration at the county-year level from 2000-2008. We document a positive relationship between Internet penetration and newspaper readability. This result appears...

How does the development of formal standards for information and communication technologies shape the behavior of firms that may need the technologies to develop new products and services? We argue that standardization lowers the search costs of identifying important intellectual property rights...

This paper studies a “market creating” firm that offers a matching environment, by charging an access fee, to a population of users who wish to form a match. We focus on an environment where users only observe a signal from their randomly assigned partner's type and the signal...

We present a model of industry standard setting with two-sided asymmetric information about the existence of intellectual property. We provide an equilibrium analysis of (a) firms' incentives to communicate ideas for improvements of an industry standard, and (b) firms' decisions to disclose the...