Following the Internet’s widespread adoption, much economic work has studied ‘online platforms’: firms that mainly interact with consumers in cyberspace. This article surveys such work, focusing on the ways in which traditional economic models have been adapted to incorporate...

We study third degree price discrimination in intermediate good markets, in which costs of production for the downstream firms are determined by their investment choices. We focus on the effect of the sequence of firm actions and analyze two models with different timing of investments, before or...

This paper analyses the impact of competition among downstream firms on an upstream firm's payoff and on its incentive to vertically integrate when firms on both segments negotiate optimal contracts. We argue that tougher competition decreases the downstream industry profit, but improves the...

In this paper, we present and test the empirical implications of competing theories about how expectations of outcomes affect utility. In the first utility formulation, which is consistent with particular interpretations of disappointment, prospect theory and regret theory, individuals receive...

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 examine the nature of stated subjective probabilities in a complex, evolving context in which true event probabilities are not within subjects' explicit information set. Specically, we collect information on subjective expectations in a car race wherein participants must bet on a particular...

This paper studies information acquisition under competitive pressure and proposes a model to examine the relationship between product market competition and the level of innovative ac- tivity in an industry. Our paper offers theoretical support for recent empirical results that point to an...

We compare four approaches to network neutrality and network management regulation in a two-sided market model: (i) no variations in Quality of Service and no price discrimination; (ii) variations in Quality of Service but no price discrimination; (iii) variations in Quality of Service and price...

Presenting a novel model of local shopping, the benefit of monopoly provision due to market size effects is explored. Prices are lower, variety and aggregate consumer surplus higher, than local shopping but many shoppers’ utility falls. Policymakers should take care.

We study how net neutrality regulations affect a high-bandwidth content provider’s (CP) investment incentives in quality of services (QoS). We find that the effects crucially depend on network capacity levels. With limited capacity, as in mobile networks, prioritized delivery services are...