The Internet has changed the nature of doing business as well as the nature of competition in many industries. The number of online transactions has seen a steady increase as more consumers turn to online retailing (e-tailing) for a wide range of product choices and shopping convenience. Yet,...

One most conspicuous and curious phenomenon in online auctions is that a large fraction of goods sold have posted price clauses whereby bidders can buy the goods without taking part in the auctions. Two types of posted price clauses exemplified by Amazon and eBay are found. The paper first...

This paper investigates the strategies of a data broker in selling information to one or to two competing firms that can price-discriminate consumers. The data broker can strategically choose any segment of the consumer demand (information structure) to sell to firms that implement third-degree...

This paper provides a nonmathematical introduction to the US economy's information processing ratio (R/C). This measure derived by Parker (2016-2019), was utilized to study the emergence of flash crashes, the evolution of the business cycle, and to provide an important new link connecting the...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Digital Layer to empirically investigate inter-firm relations at any geographical scale of analysis. The Digital Layer is created from large-scale, structured web scraping of firm websites, their textual content and the hyperlinks among them. Using...