One striking development associated with the explosion of e-commerce is the increased transparency of sellers' quality history. In this paper we analyze how this affects firms' incentives to invest in quality when the outcome of investment is uncertain. We identify two conflicting effects. On...

Price comparison websites, where consumers can compare prices at a search cost that is close to zero, have become increasingly common around the world. Using daily information on prices, click-throughs, and the number of retailers for a sample of consumer electronics and durable goods over a...

We analyse consumers' search and purchase decisions on an Internet platform. Using a rich dataset on all adverts posted and transactions made on a major French Internet platform (PriceMinister), we show evidence of substantial price dispersion among adverts for the same product. We also show...

This article examines how the consumer's search cost and filtering on a retail platform affect the platform, the third-party sellers, and the consumers. We show that, given the platform's percentage referral fee, a lower search cost can either increase or lower the platform's profit. By...

We analyse consumers' search and purchase decisions on an Internet platform. Using a rich dataset on all adverts posted and transactions made on a major French Internet platform (PriceMinister), we show evidence of substantial price dispersion among adverts for the same product. We also show...

Every new method of trade offers an opportunity for economic agents to compare its costs and benefits relative to the status quo. Such comparison motivates sorting across market segments and reshapes the whole marketplace. The Internet provides an excellent example: it introduces substantial...

Every new method of trade offers an opportunity for economic agents to compare its costs and benefits relative to the status quo. Such comparison motivates sorting across market segments and reshapes the whole marketplace. The Internet provides an excellent example: it introduces substantial...

Historians claim that in the nineteenth century Catalan cotton manufacturers were giving informal credit to their clients, and were therefore unable to transfer this credit to the banking system. Such circumstances would have had a detrimental effect on the profitability of the cotton firms....

We study team design in the presence of career concerns. In the model, the agents have explicit effort incentives from performance-dependent compensation contracts and implicit effort incentives from career concerns. With uniform teams, the principal assigns agents with similar career concerns...