Mobile phones have spread around the developing world at an amazing speed. Their proliferation has given rise to numerous mobile phone-enabled services (m-services) in the areas of health, education, agriculture and entertainment. However, to date many of these services are barely scratching the...

We study peer influence in an online social network on a platform where consumers purchase music albums. They can follow their peers and become informed about their consumption choices. In particular, we are interested in how this affects consumers' exploration of new music that exhibits...

By regulating how firms collect, store, and use data, privacy laws may change the role of data in production and alter firm demand for information technology inputs. We study how firms respond to privacy laws in the context of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by using seven...

Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large US technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon, and Fujitsu. Chinese...

In December 2020, new regulation of digital markets was proposed by European Commission. It specifically addresses main concerns raised by business behavior of operators of core services in their gatekeeping positions. However, voice assistants (or digital personal assistants, DPAs, e.g. Apple's...

Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty highlights the role of “voice” when individuals confront an unexpected deterioration in quality. Yet, voice has received little attention. To motivate our empirical analysis, we develop a simple model of voice as the equilibrium of a relational contract...

Bloggers devote significant time not only producing content for others to read, watch or listen to, but also paying attention to and engaging in interactions with other bloggers. We hope to throw light not only on the factors that gain bloggers significant readership and lively interactions with...

We analyze the impact of the Network Enforcement Act, the first regulation which aims at restraining hate speech on large social media platforms. Using a difference-in- differences framework, we measure the causal impact of the German law on the prevalence of hateful content on German Twitter....

Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

This paper summarizes and connects the main findings of the habilitation project. The important social developments analyzed, result from the demographic change that many economies will face in the future. Especially on the regional level, problems arise due to increasing disparities in...