Purpose - this paper aims to analyse the business efficiency of the Alibaba platform at the beginning and during the COVID-19 crisis. Methodology/Design - The research is based on the official financial reports of the platform as well as on the reports of other specialized agencies that monitor...

This paper considers issues around digital platforms and their ethical responsibilities in the context of a wider crisis of institutional trust in liberal democracies. It discusses options for external regulation as self-regulation appears to have failed, which include industry codes of...

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...

Why do BigTech platforms introduce payment services? Digital platforms often run business models where activities on the platform generate data that can be monetized off the platform. There is a trade-off between the value of such data and the privacy concerns of users, since platforms need to...

We study a model of financial intermediation, payment choice, and privacy in the digital economy. Cash preserves anonymity but cannot be used for more efficient online transactions. By contrast, bank deposits can be used online but do not preserve anonymity. Banks use the information contained...

Dominant digital platforms such as Google and Facebook collect personal information of users by default precipitating a market failure in the market for personal information. We establish the economic harms from the market failure. We discuss conditions for eliminating the market failure and...

The rise of digital platforms necessarily entails the processing of personal data between platforms and their users. More than enabling the delivery of services by the platforms, data shared by users has increasingly become valuable as various businesses are able to leverage their access to data...