Platforms operators act as private regulators to increase usage and maximize profits. Their goals depend on the development of the platform: overcoming the chicken-egg problem early on requires attracting platform participants while quality becomes more important later on. Private regulators...

We study the conditions for the emergence of cooperation in a spatial common-pool resource game. We consider three types of agents: cooperators, defectors and enforcers. The role of enforcers is to punish defectors for overharvesting the resource. Agents are located around a circle and they only...

This paper provides the first causal evidence that hostile activities online lead to physical violence. Given the recently documented relationship between pollution and social media, I exploit exogenous variation in local air quality as the first step to instrument for online aggression. In an...

Im Hinblick auf die Verabschiedung des Digital Services Act im Jahr 2022, der einen neuen horizontalen Rechtsrahmen für die Regulierung digitaler Dienste vorsieht, analysiert dieses Diskussionspapier die Moderation von Inhalten auf Online-Plattformen. Die Moderation von Inhalten ist eine sehr...

Es wird zunehmend schwieriger, den Fachkräftebedarf auf dem deutschen Arbeitsmarkt zu decken. Das gilt auch für Familienunternehmen. Die Studie untersucht die Personalarbeit von Familienunternehmen anhand von Karrierebereichen und Stellenanzeigen und zeigt Unterschiede zu...

Gordon Tullock has been one of the most important founders and contributors to Public Choice. Two innovations are typical Tullock Challenges. The first relates to method: the measurement of subjective well-being, or happiness. The second relates to digital social networks such as Facebook,...

The disclosure requirements for firms issuing equity on German crowdinvestingplatforms are quite lax at the moment. This paper states that this loose requirement policy is not optimal in the presence of competition among platforms. First, a simple three-staged theoretical model is derived to...

On crowdinvesting-platforms, non-publicly traded companies can offer equity to private investors. Currently, platforms like Crowdcube.com in Great Britain or Seedmatch.de in Germany are using a mechanism for the allocation of available shares best described by the phrase first come, first...

Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a...