The market structure of platform competition is critically important to managers and policy makers. Network effects in these markets predict concentrated industry structures, whereas competitive effects and differentiation suggest the opposite. Standard theory offers little guidance — full...

The recent theoretical literature suggests that consumer myopia may lead firms to profitably suppress or shroud some attributes of the price. Empirical and experimental data also suggest that sellers gain by transferring a larger fraction of the price to the shrouded attributes. However,...

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the...

We conducted 80 auctions on eBay. Forty of these auctions were for various popular music CDs while the remaining 40 auctions were for video games for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. The revenue equivalence theorem states that any auction form having the same effective reserve price yields the...

Many firms divide the price a consumer pays for a good into two pieces---the price for the item itself and the price for shipping and handling. With fully rational customers, the exact division between the two prices is irrelevant---only the total price matters. We test this hypothesis by...

We use field and natural experiments in online auctions to study the revenue effect of varying the level and disclosure of shipping charges. Our main findings are (1) disclosure affects revenues-for low shipping charges, a seller is better off disclosing; and (2) increasing shipping charges...

We explore the relationship between incentives and Shadow Risks - those risks that are not easily captured by common financial measures and yet can lead to major adverse events. Theoretically, increased risk-taking is nonmonotonic in higher powered executive compensation. However, for those...