Platforms often use fee discrimination within their marketplace (e.g., Amazon, eBay, and Uber specify a variety of merchant fees). To better understand the impact of marketplace fee discrimination, we develop a model that allows us to determine equilibrium fee and category decisions that depend...

Regulators around the world are discussing, or taking action to limit, self-preferencing by large platforms. This paper explores Amazon's search rankings of its own products as the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) was coming into effect. Using data on over 8 million Amazon search...

This paper analyses the dynamics of hotel prices listed on Booking.com in the period 2014-16. This period is characterised by the most important antitrust decisions regarding the use of price parity clauses by online travel agencies (OTAs) in the EU. First, we document the dynamics of hotel...

In two-sided markets a platform allows consumers and sellers to interact by creating sub-markets within the platform marketplace. For example, Amazon has sub-markets for all of the different product categories available on its site, and smartphones have sub-markets for different types of...

This study focuses on collaborative economy platforms that specialize in purely digital tasks that require no physical delivery or proximity between workers and their clients, which we call Online Labour Markets (OLMs). They have a global reach. There is a debate on job fragmentation and...

Online dating has recently become the most common way for new couples to meet, with three-in-ten Americans having used dating apps, and revenues from dating apps swelling to more than five billion annually. The majority of these dating apps earn revenue via subscription based pricing, where...

Online platforms often face challenges being both fair (i.e., non-discriminatory) and efficient (i.e., maximizing revenue). Using computer vision algorithms and observational data from a microlending marketplace, we find that choices made by borrowers creating online profiles impact both of...

How can policymakers promote women-led exporting firms? In this paper, we study the role of online business platforms to reduce informational barriers to exporting for women entrepreneurs. We hypothesize that, if the costs associated with accessing digital platforms are more symmetric across...

Digital platforms are organized by some of the world’s largest firms to serve multiple inter-connected markets. Facebook is a giant firm that organizes a marketplace, and we use it as an example to illustrate why information privacy should be analyzed as a major dimension of platform...

There are works in the economic literature devoted to various aspects of digital platforms’ activities. At the same time, there no published studies examining digital platforms from the point of view of the institutional economy. The digital platform is viewed by the authors from an...