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...

A key property of the World Wide Web is the possibility for firms to place virtually costless links to third-party content as a substitute or complement to their own content. This ability to hyperlink has enabled new types of players, such as search engines and content aggregators, to...

Online peer-to-peer communities and online social networks have become increasingly popular. In particular, the recent boost of online peer-to-peer communities leads to exponential growth in sharing of user-contributed content which have brought profound changes to business and economic...

We study an e-commerce platform’s incentives to delist IP-infringing products and the effects of introducing a liability regime that induces the platform to increase its screening intensity. We identify conditions under which platform liability is socially desirable (respectively, undesirable)...

Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an...

Increasingly detailed consumer information makes sophisticated price discrimination possible. At fine levels of aggregation, demand may not obey standard regularity conditions. We propose a new randomized sales mechanism for such environments. Bidders can "buy-it-now" at a posted price, or...

Many video ads are designed to go 'viral,' so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable...

This paper studies the impact of platform-owner entry threat on complementors in platform-based markets. We examine how app developers on the Android mobile platform adjust innovation efforts (rate and direction) and value-capture strategies in response to the threat of Google's entry into their...

We study how the sharing of peer success on an enterprise digital platform affects worker productivity. Using sales workers in an information technology service company as our research context, we leverage the unexpected resignation of several human resources staff as an exogenous shock to the...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or un-representative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce someone a platform supplier to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other...