Intermediaries in decentralized markets can affect buyer welfare both directly, by reducing expenses for buyers with high search cost and indirectly, through a search-externality that affects the prices paid by buyers that do not use intermediaries. I investigate the magnitude of these effects...

We study the impact of investor heterogeneity on mutual fund market segmentation. To motivate our empirical analysis, we make two assumptions. First, some investors inherently value broker services. Second, because brokers are only compensated when they sell mutual funds, they have little...

In many markets, user benefits depend on participation and usage decisions of other users giving rise to network effects. Intermediaries manage these network effects and thus act as platforms that bring users together. This paper reviews key findings from the literature on network effects and...