Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – the FANG companies – have transformed society with both positive and negative effects. Soaring consumer access to information, news, social networks, and entertainment has been stimulated by the ever-more ubiquitous and falling...

This paper undertakes a critical review of the prospect that self-learning pricing algorithms will lead to widespread collusion independently of the intervention and participation of humans. There is no concrete evidence, no example yet, and no antitrust case that self-learning pricing...

This paper theoretically analyzes the role of reference prices on competition and welfare in a context of a circular city model with free entry and reference prices, in which paying market prices above a reference negatively affects the utility of consumers. Agents interact in a three-stage...

This paper investigates the effect of Internet car referral services on dealer pricing of automobiles in California. Combining data from J.D. Power and Associates and Autobytel.com, a major online auto referral service, we compare online transaction prices to regular "street" prices. We find...

Airports have become platforms that derive revenues from both aeronautical and commercial activities. The demand for these services is characterized by a one-way complementarity in that only air travelers can purchase retail goods at the airport terminals. We analyze a model of optimal airport...

This paper contains a theoretical analysis demonstrating that a retail price floor can increase the expected profits of an upstream firm when it is asymmetrically informed about the state of product demand. The retail price floor serves to eliminate the incentives of the upstream firm to...

This paper considers how a publisher should set reserve prices for real-time bidding (RTB) auctions when selling display advertising impressions through ad exchanges, a $115 billion market and growing. Conducting a series of field experiments to induce exogenous variation in reserve prices at a...

Matched product data is collected from the leading online grocers in the U.S. The same exact products are identified in scanner data. The paper documents pricing strategies within and across online (and offline) retailers. First, online retailers exhibit substantially less uniform pricing than...

I develop a semi-structural approach to identify network effects on two-sided monopoly platforms without data on prices and quantities. A sufficient test for the existence of network effects is derived when only data on total revenue is available. If separate revenue data is available on the two...

There can be no doubt that the FANG companies – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, as well as Twitter – have transformed society since their emergence. Like all social transformations, the changes wrought by their services have had ripple effects that are both positive and negative. On...