The arrival of the digital platform for buying and selling goods is altering the nature of markets by creating enormous economies of scale and enabling firms to reach purchasers far and wide. Further, digital platforms, especially when they are themselves profit-making firms, give rise to new...

Scholars increasingly use machine learning techniques such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to reduce the dimensionality of textual data and to study discourse in collective bodies. However, measures of discourse based on algorithmic results typically have no intuitive meaning or obvious...

Videoconferencing has recently become ubiquitous due to the COVID-19 pandemic but has been growing in importance for decades. Despite this growth, we have limited understanding of the costs associated with adopting this technology. In this paper I leverage a novel dataset tracking 1.7 million...

Many private and public institutions depend on reasoned discourse to reach decisions. Before collective action, before voting, tends to come reasoned discourse, at least in aspiration. Reformers commonly call for increases in the transparency of collective decision-making, lobbying for instance...

The digital revolution, along with the growth of the companies known collectively as Big Tech, is transforming the global economy and giving rise to novel policy challenges. This paper analyzes the microeconomic foundations of this change, particularly how the natures of competition and...