56K modems were introduced under two competing incompatible standards. We show the importance of competition between Internet Service Providers in the adoption process. We show that ISP’s were less likely to adopt the technology that more competitors adopted. This result is particularly...

Finding information about privacy practices can be difficult: privacy policies often do not present this information in an accessible way. People typically do not know how or for what purpose their personal information, gathered online, will be used. When asked, people frequently express...

We develop a structural econometric framework that allows us to simulate the effects of mergers among two-sided platforms selling differentiated products. We apply the proposed methodology to the Dutch newspaper industry. Our structural model encompasses demands for differentiated products on...

This experiment focuses on a contest played over a star network of 6 nodes. By placing targets in a network, the value of a target is dependent on its connectivity to other targets. The experiment compares the cases where the defense is centrally planned by a defense planner with a case where...

Despite the abundance of studies on consequences of certification, there is little empirical research on what motivates sellers to attempt certifications in the first place. One of the most intriguing theoretical predictions is the “information unraveling” proposition, which predicts a...

We empirically investigate the platform competition in the online daily deals promotion market that is characterized by intense rivalry between two leading promotion sites, Groupon and LivingSocial, that broker between merchants and consumers. We find that deals offered through Groupon, the...

We examined whether people conform to or diverge from the most popular choice among their friends by conducting a large-scale field experiment on a leading social-networking site in China. Our setting allowed us to minimize confounding effects such as pre-existing taste similarities between a...

We investigate the impact of backward compatibility on the adoption of multi-generation platforms. Our context is a mobile platform where platform users download services from third party providers. For each hardware platform generations, the services depend greatly on the embedded...

Consumers buy internet access from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to reach online content providers. Under net neutrality, an ISP is not allowed to discriminate between content providers, even though it might have an incentive to do so. An ISP might want to sell a “fast lane” to content...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks. However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...