We study price discrimination by a monopoly two-sided platform who mediates interactions between two different groups of agents. We adapt a canonical model of second degree price discrimination a la Mussa and Rosen (1978) to a two-sided platform by focusing on non-responsiveness, a clash between...

Social broadcasting networks like Twitter in the U.S. and “Weibo” in China are transforming the way online word-of-mouth is disseminated and consumed in our society. We investigate whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales using publicly available Twitter data and common text mining...

This paper considers the joint creation and consumption of content on user generated content platforms (e.g., reviews or articles, chat, videos, etc.). On these platforms, users' utilities depend upon the participation of others; hence, users' expectations regarding the participation of others...

Many firms have introduced internet-based customer self-service applications, such as online payments or brokerage services. Despite high initial signup rates, not all customers actually shift their dealings online. We investigate whether the multi-stage nature of the adoption process (an...

Sellers sometimes offer goods for sale under both a regular price and a discount for group purchase if the consumer group reaches some minimum size. This selling practice, which we term interpersonal bundling, has been popularized on the Internet by companies such as Groupon. We explain why...

Traditionally, the value of a product has been assessed according to the direct revenues the product creates. However, products do not exist in isolation but rather influence one another's sales. Such influence is especially evident in eCommerce environments, where products are often presented...

We approach the issue of the value of a platform to a seller in a two-sided market where both buyers and sellers multi-home. A seller that loses access to a major buyer platform can potentially incur substantial financial losses. We exploit a recent conflict between American Airlines and two...

We study how access pricing affects network competition when consumers' subscription demand is elastic and networks compete with non-linear prices and can use termination-based price discrimination. In the case of annexed per minute termination charge, our model generalizes the results of Gans...

We study competition among upstream firms when each of them sells a portfolio of distinct products and the downstream has a limited number of slots (or shelf space). In this situation, we study how bundling affects competition for slots. When the downstream has k number of slots, social...

We study a retail benchmarking approach to determine access prices for interconnected networks. Instead of considering fixed access charges as in the existing literature, we study access pricing rules that determine the access price that network i pays to network j as a linear function of the...