We analyze geographic patterns of trade using transactions data from eBay and MercadoLibre, two large online auction sites. We find that distance continues to be an important deterrent to trade between geographically separated buyers and sellers, though at a lesser extent than has been observed...

We study oligopolistic firms' incentives to share customer information about past purchase history in a situation where firms are uncertain about whether a particular consumer considers the product offerings complements or substitutes. By addressing this new type of behavior-based price...

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet has dramatically changed the way that consumers shop for goods. Consumer-generated product reviews have become a valuable source of information for customers, who read the reviews and decide whether to buy the product based on the information...

The availability and variety of online services has increased dramatically in recent years. Many questions remain, however, regarding patterns of online service use, consumer preferences when using online services, and how consumers substitute between equivalent online and offline services....

We study a retail benchmarking approach to determine access prices for interconnected networks. Instead of considering fixed access charges as in the existing literature, we study access pricing rules that determine the access price that network i pays to network j as a linear function of the...

This paper develops an empirical framework to analyze consumer’s dynamic switching decision in the cellular service industry. It first incorporates the sequential problem of quantity, plan and firm subscription choice in the presence of switching costs into a dynamic structural model, which...

The literature of private provision of public goods suggests that incentive to contribute is inversely related to group size. This paper empirically tests this relationship using field data from Chinese Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. We exploit an exogenous reduction in group size as a...

The paper analyzes and compares the investment incentives of platform and application developers for Linux and Windows. We find that the level of investment in applications is larger when the operating system is open source rather than proprietary. The comparison of the levels of investment in...

The idea of a ‘global digital divide’ is well accepted, and cross-country studies of determinants of differences in computer and Internet penetration have identified income, telecommunications infrastructure, and regulatory quality as key influencing factors. The policy implications from...