This article provides an overview of the competitive issues surrounding online platforms. The general theme is that while much has been made of the structural features of online platforms there is little hard evidence that these are durable monopolies. Nonetheless, there are concerns about the...

This study leverages the unique opportunities presented by the digitization of economic activity to investigate the impact of Thailand's 'Half and Half' program-a targeted, digital co-pay fiscal stimulus-on SMEs and consumer spending. Utilizing weekly province-level data from LINE MAN Wongnai, a...

Micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are recognized as crucial drivers of economic development, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The advent of digital platforms, characterized by economies of scale and significant cross-network externalities in two-sided markets,...

This paper aims to contribute to the better understanding, and in consequence, better development and implementation of crowdfunding projects for filmmaking. This study covers two areas of analysis: project-level research and founders-level (creators-level) research. In the first area, the...

Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms have become a major engine of growth in Internet commerce. This is especially true in countries such as China, which are experiencing a big rush towards electronic commerce. The emergence of such platforms gives researchers the unique opportunity to...

Recent claims that online platforms have secured permanent monopolies, protected by barriers to entry from network effects and stockpiles of data, and should be the focus of intense antitrust and regulatory scrutiny, are inconsistent with the economics, technology, and history of online...

Should the FTC have allowed Zillow to acquire its foremost rival, Trulia? It is increasingly well-accepted that digital platforms tend toward dominance in their immediately adjacent relevant-product markets. Google, for example, has long held a majority share of the markets for general-search...

Online platform use has grown remarkably in the last decade. Despite this, our understanding of its implications for economic outcomes is scarce and often limited to case studies and advanced countries. Using a newly built harmonised international dataset of online platforms and their use across...

Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

We conduct a year-long experiment among new sellers on a large e-commerce platform. The treatment group receives access to a free and customized entrepreneur training program, in which an AI algorithm assigns training materials to sellers based on their real-time operating statistics. With a 24%...