The aim of this paper is to study the empirical phenomenon of rating bubbles, i.e. clustering on extremely positive values in e-commerce platforms and rating web sites. By means of a field experiment that exogenously manipulates prior ratings for a hotel in an important Italian tourism...

We build a model of online behavioral manipulation driven by AI advances. A platform dynamically offers one of n products to a user who slowly learns product quality. User learning depends on a product's "glossiness,' which captures attributes that make products appear more attractive than they...

Platforms often display their products ahead of third-party products in search. Is this due to consumers preferring platform-owned products or platforms engaging in self-preferencing by biasing search towards their own products? What are the welfare implications? I develop a structural model of...

Recent progress in information technologies provides sellers with detailed knowledge about consumers' preferences, approaching perfect price discrimination in the limit.We construct a model where consumers with less strategic sophistication than the seller's pricing algorithm face a trade-off...

Users and suppliers of complementary products on digital platforms routinely face several non-trivial challenges due to an overload of information and fierce competition for attention. As such, effective management and governance mechanisms facilitating network effects and value co-creation with...

This study examines the situation in which a monopolist offers freeware as an advertisement for the increase of demand to maximize profit even though the existence of such freeware will reduce the power of the monopolist in the market. This study proves that the successful application of...

This paper examines price elasticities on a price comparison website and if there is a discontinuity in demand for retailers having the lowest price, or products having the highest consumer rating. Previous research is extended upon, with a larger, more recent, and more varied dataset, with...

Consumers commonly seek information from critic and consumer reviews when new product quality remains uncertain. However, consumer reviews are endogenous and may be subject to potential biases (e.g., self-selection). In this paper, we propose a new dynamic structural model where forward-looking...

Despite substantial efforts to help consumers search in more intuitive ways, text search remains the predominant tool for product discovery online. In this paper, we explore the effects of visual and textual cues for search refinement on consumer search and purchasing behavior. We collaborate...

As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly...