The advent of online advertising has simultaneously created unprecedented opportunities for advertisers to target consumers and prompted privacy concerns among consumers and regulators. This paper estimates the financial impact of privacy policies on the online display ad industry by applying an...

E-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Alibaba and Flipkart, that match sellers and consumers at an unprecedented scale, operate their internal search engines to help buyers find relevant products from a large number of sellers, and also allow sellers to advertise to consumers for positions in...

The Internet is growing at a rate of almost 50-100% per year in India. From being a medium for exchange of information and communication between the scientific research workers, it has opened a vast vista of entertainment and information (edutainment) for millions of people on the Internet...

This paper considers the monetization of online marketplaces. These platforms trade-off fees from advertising with commissions from product sales. While featuring advertised products can make search less efficient (lowering transaction commissions), it incentivizes sellers to compete for better...

In 2018, the European Council and the UK and Spanish governments each proposed to introduce a Digital Services Tax (DST), to be levied on the revenue of large digital platform companies earned from advertising, online intermediation, and/or the transmission of data. We offer a rationalization of...

We develop an experimental methodology that values “free” digital content through the lens of a production account and is consistent with the framework of the national accounts. We build upon the work in Nakamura, et al. (2016) by combining marketing- and advertising-supported content and...

Since 2018, the UK government, the European Commission, and several European national governments have advanced bold proposals for a new “digital services tax” (DST), with the aim of capturing profits earned by multinationals that reflect value contributed by users of digital platforms. I...

Online marketplaces are increasingly adopting innovative business models such as using paid advertising as a major revenue source. We explore the two popular advertising tools, sponsored search and social media endorsement, in attracting web traffic from online sellers' perspective. We estimate...

In 2018, the European Council and the UK and Spanish governments each proposed to introduce a Digital Services Tax (DST), to be levied on the revenue of large digital platforms from advertising, online intermediation, and/or the transmission of data. We offer a rationalization of the DST as a...

Thanks to new digital technologies, web users are continuously targeted by offers that potentially fit their interests even if they are not actively looking for a product. Does this matching always promote transactions with high social value? We consider a model in which web users with...