Many online businesses, including most of the largest platforms, seek and provide attention. These online attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services, to merchants, developers and others...

In order to decrease social distance and increase trust on their platforms, many online marketplaces allow traders to be represented by profile pictures or avatars. In a laboratory experiment, we investigate whether the presence of seller avatars affects trading behavior in a market. We contrast...

We introduce a model of a platform in which users encounter news of unknown veracity. Users vary in their propensity to share news and can learn the veracity of news at a cost. In turn, the production of fake news is both more sensitive to sharing rates and cheaper than its truthful counterpart....

The proposed regulation launched by the European Commission on the gatekeepers' regime under the name of the Digital Market Act and the Digital Services Act represents an important change in the regulation and commitments of the platforms that initially control the market, or have that capacity,...

This paper presents a review of empirical methods used to assess the behavioral, economic, and political outcomes of Internet and social media usage. Instead of merely surveying the various impacts of the Internet, we examine the methods adopted to identify these impacts. We describe two main...

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing....

The peer-to-peer loan market was designed to bring together borrowers and lenders without banks as middlemen. Yet over time P2P lending platforms have evolved into new intermediaries, performing essentially all tasks related to loan evaluation. By contrast, lenders are overwhelmingly passive and...

Due to computing and communication facilities, formal procedures, often referred to as ‘algorithms', are now extensively used in public, economic and social areas. These procedures, currently at the forefront of criticisms, share some features with mechanisms as defined by economists,...