One researcher asserts that half of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States will be bankrupt within the next few decades. Change is coming whether colleges and universities like it or not. Think of what is happening to the newspapers and retailers. Unfortunately, most...

One college president remarked: "Colleges are very good at adding. They're not good at subtracting." This is not only true when it comes to creating academic departments but is also true with respect to hiring administrators. This paper demonstrates that reducing the number of departments via...

We introduce a model of a platform in which users encounter news of unknown veracity. Users vary in their propensity to share news and can learn the veracity of news at a cost. In turn, the production of fake news is both more sensitive to sharing rates and cheaper than its truthful counterpart....

Social media affects not only the way we consume news, but also the way news is pro- duced, including by traditional media outlets. In this paper, we study the propagation of information from social media to mainstream media, and investigate whether news ed- itors are influenced in their...

We review the economics of superstars, originally developed for stars in traditional media, and discuss whether they are applicable for the (allegedly) novel phenomenon of stars in social media (influencer, micro-celebrities). Moreover, we analyse potentially new factors for creating social...

Users and suppliers of complementary products on digital platforms routinely face several non-trivial challenges due to an overload of information and fierce competition for attention. As such, effective management and governance mechanisms facilitating network effects and value co-creation with...

We study the incentives of a social network to control two types of information circulating on its platform, namely display advertising by two quality-differentiated firms and "social information" (purchasing decisions shared among consumers). Consumers' choices are influenced by both of these...

We construct a Hotelling-type model of two media providers, each of whom can issue fake and/or real news and each of whom can invest in the debunking of their rival's fake news. The model assumes that consumers have an innate preference for one provider or the other and value real news. However,...

The introduction of a new product generation forces incumbents in platform markets to rebuild their installed base of complementary products. Using three different datasets on the US market for video game consoles, we show that incumbents can to some extent substitute for rebuilding their new...

We measure the welfare consequences of endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets. We introduce the concept of a "quality markup" and measure the relative importance for welfare of market power over price versus market power over quality. For U.S. cable-television markets...