The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has led to numerous companies investing significant resources in developing mobile applications, in every imaginable domain. As apps proliferate, understanding the impact of app adoption on key outcomes of interest and linking this...

Making sustainable profits from a baseline zero price and motivating free consumers to convert to premium subscribers is a continuing challenge for all freemium communities. Prior research has causally established that social engagement (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson 2013) and peer influence...

The growing popularity of online dating websites is altering one of the most fundamental human activities: finding a date or a marriage partner. Online dating platforms offer new capabilities, such as extensive search, big-data based mate recommendations and varying levels of anonymity, whose...

With one-third of marriages in the United States beginning online, online dating platforms have become important curators of the modern social fabric. Prior work on online dating has elicited two critical frictions in the heterosexual dating market: women, governed by age-old social norms of not...

This paper studies the impact of friction and preferences on match formation in two-sided markets. Because every agent has private information about their preferences for potential matches’ characteristics, forming a match based on mutual compatibility requires extensive costly search. We use...