We analyze the welfare effects of price discrimination by a monopolistic platform that mediates between two sides of a market. Discrimination is based on asymmetric costs on one side of the market and may be allowed on either or both sides. We show that unconstrained discrimination on both sides...

The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the...

This paper analyzes the regional dimension of the German digital divide. It studies the determinants of home Internet use in Germany on the level of counties as well as on the level of individuals. Based on two large data sets, the analyses show that population density itself cannot explain...

Most real world situations that are susceptible to herding are also characterized by direct payoff externalities. Yet, the bulk of the theoretical and experimental literature on herding has focused on pure informational externalities. In this paper we experi- mentally investigate the effects of...

Most real world situations which are susceptible to herding are also characterized by direct payoff externalities. Yet, the bulk of the theoretical and experimental literature focuses on pure informational externalities. In this paper we study several different forms of payoff externalities that...