E-commerce is growing rapidly on a global scale. Among many products purchased via the Internet, clothing is the first in terms of purchase frequency. However, there are growth barriers for this product category, which include, first of all, the client's fear of matching clothing to their own...

Adverse selection induces economic limits to market substitution. If quality uncertainty persists in both internet and traditional marketplaces, a second-best equilibrium with parallel market segments may arise. Positive trade in parallel segments implies that the information cost advantage of...

This paper analyzes the strategic opportunities enabled by one of Booking.com's managerial innovations introduced in 2015-16: a new online discount feature. Focusing on the hospitality and online booking platforms, we explore the role of the heterogeneity in characteristics that make...

Over the last years, several reports highlighted the market power of very large online platforms that are gatekeeping intermediaries between businesses and consumers, and the difficulty for classic competition policy tools to deal effectively with anti-competitive practices in these platforms....

The importance of digital platforms and related data-driven business models is ever increasing and poses challenges for the workability of competition in the respective markets (tendencies towards dominant platforms, paying-with-data instead of traditional money, privacy concerns, etc.). Due to...

Digital platforms facilitate the flow of information and the execution of transactions. This study investigates the impact of signals from platform-provided online information regarding search and experience attributes of products on the prices of their offline transactions. We situate our...

This paper investigates the link between unemployment and external trade in Germany, using data on unemployment, international trade and economic activity for the 16 German federal states (Länder). With panel data econometrics we show that international trade as measured by state-wise trade...

The paper explores the basic features of structural change towards services for OECD countries in general and for Germany in particular. The determinants of sectoral shifts are analytically decomposed into the demandbias and the productivity-bias. The demand-bias, which prevails in all OECD...