Screening is considered a necessary mechanism for alleviating information asymmetry but has also raised concerns of increased discrimination in online peer-to-peer market platforms. Paradoxically, providers of goods and services may also voluntarily forgo screening, even though it increases the...

We study the online market for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, in which individuals bid on unsecured microloans sought by other individual borrowers. Using a large sample of consummated and failed listings from the largest online P2P lending marketplace - Prosper.com, we find that the online...

Although the efficiency-enhancing features of online markets have been well studied, much less is known about firms' differentiation strategies in these competitive markets, or the outcomes of such differentiation. This study examines competition among firms in online sponsored search markets -...

With the decentralization of information and the democratization of expertise brought about by the growth of the Web, consumers now have access to a plethora of information on various aspects of their purchase process. This study seeks to examine whether such decentralized online information...

Possibly. We empirically examine the plausibility of rational models designed to explain stock price bubbles associated with technological revolutions such as the internet. Our innovation is to examine the volatility patterns of old economy (brick and mortar) firms that adopted the internet as a...

This paper is among the first to use a unique controlled empirical setting - traditional firms' adoption of the Internet for commerce - to investigate the impact of changes in firms' technological environment on their stock return volatility. Using three distinct empirical methodologies we...

Prior studies of online crowdsourcing platforms have examined participants’ behaviors and found that experienced designers are more likely to win in crowdsourcing contests. However, what gives experienced designers an edge in these contests is not well understood. Our study seeks to understand...

An extensive literature in economics and finance has documented “home bias,” the tendency that transactions are more likely to occur between parties in the same geographical area, rather than outside. Using data from a large online crowdfunding marketplace and employing a quasi-experimental...

Although third-party trust seals have been in use for long by online retailers, systematic studies of the effectiveness of these trust signaling mechanisms are scarce. Using a unique dataset of over a quarter million online transactions across 493 online retailers, this study seeks to...