Three Essays on the Economics of Online Platforms

Three Essays on the Economics of Online Platforms PDF Author: Kevin Ducbao Tran
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Three Essays on the Economics of Online Platforms

Three Essays on the Economics of Online Platforms PDF Author: Kevin Ducbao Tran
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Three Essays on Economics of Online Communities and Platforms

Three Essays on Economics of Online Communities and Platforms PDF Author: Zike Cao
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ISBN:
Category : Online social networks in business
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Three Essays on Economics of Online Platforms

Three Essays on Economics of Online Platforms PDF Author: Jiadi Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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This dissertation consists of three papers related to the economics of online platforms: one on e-commerce shipping, one on sports event attendance, and another on online concert ticket platforms.In the first chapter, we estimate online customer preferences on product price and promised delivery time using transactional level data set from JD.com. We find that promised delivery time has a significant impact on customers’ purchasing decisions. In addition, we find that, on average, female shoppers are more price-sensitive while male customers are more delivery time-sensitive. The gender difference in the delivery time preference continues to exist even after controlling for shoppers’ purchasing power and shopping behavior. The average willingness-to-pay (WTP) for one-day-faster shipping is less than 7 Yuan for female customers but close to 11 Yuan for male customers.In the second chapter, we apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the local average treatment effect of a win on the attendance of subsequent games in professional basketball. Using National Basketball Association data from seasons 1980-81 to 2017-18, we find that home team fan bases react to recent outcomes, with an increase in attendance of approximately 425 attendants (2.69% of average attendance in close games) following a close win relative to a close loss. The increment is one-eighth of a recent estimate of the superstar effect. We do not find an attendance effect when the visiting team has a recent victory, which rules out externalities. The positive fan base response to narrow home wins relative to narrow losses suggests that recent luck is rewarded in sporting attendance. We discuss possible mechanisms anddocument a gradual decline in the attendance response that coincides with the rise of alternative means for viewing games and secondary markets for tickets.In the last chapter, we look into the online platform for concert ticket markets. Ticketmaster began listing both primary event tickets and secondary tickets on its marketplace in 2013. Ticketmaster charges a preset service fee for the primary market and a fixed percentage of resale prices for both sellers and buyers. This paper develops a theoretical model to demonstrate how this pricing structure functions as a two-part tariff on ticket scalpers and improves revenue for the platform. Both platform and consumers benefit from an active resale market in some cases, even though the equilibrium may not be socially optimal.

Three Essays on the Economics of Online Games

Three Essays on the Economics of Online Games PDF Author: Christoph Safferling
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Essays on Economics of Online Platforms

Essays on Economics of Online Platforms PDF Author: Shahryar Doosti
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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In this dissertation, I study the economics of online platforms. I explore economic consequences of the interaction between firms and users through online platforms. I investigate three aspects of such interactions through data-driven economic models: mobile economy, online crowd, and social media. I study the effect of platform design on demand and monetizing online traffic. First, I study the impact of emerging mobile ecosystem on users' interaction patterns. Specifically, I choose the online shopping platform in which users have two channels to purchase the products: PC and App. I investigate whether niche products are more likely to be seen and selected in mobile channel. I also look into customers' usage patterns to draw conclusions on how to increase sales of niche products. Second, I study the online crowdfunding and the effect of the campaign design on overall success. I build a structural model to estimate the demand for Kickstarter projects and make conclusions on the effect of reward scheme designs. Third, I explore the sponsored videos on Facebook. A sponsored content (e.g. video) features the sponsor's brand or product. I study the effect of the creator-sponsor association on viewership and user engagement for videos on Facebook. More specifically, I identify multiple aspects of creator-sponsor association and investigate their effect on the overall user engagement. I highlight the managerial implications of the findings in this dissertation.

THREE ESSAYS ON RISKS OF ONLINE PLATFORM INFORMATION SYSTEMS

THREE ESSAYS ON RISKS OF ONLINE PLATFORM INFORMATION SYSTEMS PDF Author: Shuting Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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In the past decade, a fundamental research topic in the information systems (IS) discipline has been to examine the value of online platforms on businesses, society, and consumers, notably in the form of improved efficiency in information sharing, consumer engagement, and increased sales. However, the risks rooted in online platforms may cannibalize the value created, which have received limited attention in the literature and practice. In my dissertation, I attempt to fill this gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of the risks of online platforms from the angle of these three main entities in the ecosystem with three separate yet related essays. The first essay focuses on the risks for businesses that leverage social media platforms, and assesses how their posting on social media fan pages affects consumers' decision to purchase and unfollow from the firms. The second essay focuses on the risks of fake news on social media and how social media platforms may use identity verification to reduce online anonymity and combat this increasingly critical social problem. The third essay focuses on estimating the risks of using monetary incentives to motivate consumers to write online product reviews, and examines how such strategy may affect product sales. Our studies have theoretical and practical implications for designing effective online platform information systems.

Essays on Online Platforms

Essays on Online Platforms PDF Author: Zemin Zhong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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In three essays, I present my findings in three interrelated aspects of online platforms. In the first chapter, I empirically study the economics of consumer limited attention in online markets and how sellers react to this bias. The second chapter focus on studying consumer search in online platforms under targeted search technology. And in the third chapter I study the platform's search and revenue design problem. How do sellers react to consumer biases in online markets? In the first chapter I examine whether consumers are limited attentive to online ratings, and how sellers respond to it. Using 6.8 million transaction records on Taobao, I first demonstrate that consumers are limited attentive. The Taobao platform assigns each seller a summary symbol based on his/her rating score (net number of positive ratings) , and both the rating score and the symbol are made available to consumers. I show that the demand exhibits a discontinuous jump when a seller's rating score passes the threshold of a new summary symbol. More importantly, I find sellers appear to be responding by using different pricing strategies before and after reaching thresholds. As a seller's rating score gets closer to the next threshold, the seller's prices gets lower until the rating score reaches thresholds. Once the seller obtain a new summary symbol, the prices begin to increase. The kink in price levels is significant, suggesting sellers are responding to consumer limited attention. Major online platforms such as Amazon and eBay have invested significantly in search technologies to direct consumer searches to relevant products. These technologies lead to targeted search, implying consumers are visiting more relevant sellers first. For example, consumers may directly enter their desirable attributes into search queries, and the platform will retrieve relevant sellers accordingly. The platform may also let consumers refine the search outcomes by various criteria. This study characterizes the role of targeted search, and examines how targeted search affects market equilibrium and platform design. In the second chapter, I model targeted search in a differentiated market with many firms where consumers search sequentially for the best product match. One of the central results of the analysis is how targeted search affects equilibrium prices. I find its impact on price is not monotonic. When targeting is not too precise, targeted search lowers the equilibrium price. It makes sellers more similar and intensifies price competition, despite the fact that all consumers face sellers with better fit. However, once the targeting becomes sufficiently precise, the equilibrium price increases, because highly targeted search discourages active consumer search and gives sellers monopoly power. Using a unique dataset from Taobao, I find some suggestive evidence that is consistent with the model predictions. Within this setup, I endogenize the search design by allowing the platform to choose the precision of targeted search and the revenue model contract in the third chapter. I consider two major platform revenue models, commission and promoted slots, with consumer search. The platform, by providing targeted search with precision up to the aforementioned limit, can extract more consumer surplus through higher commission rates, because targeted search improves consumer surplus by lowering search cost, increasing fit, and lowering price. With targeted search up to the limit, the platform can also extract more surplus from sellers by offering promoted slots, because sellers can use promoted slots to better target consumers. However, once targeted search becomes too precise, the market will face a price hike, hurting the platform revenue in both models. Therefore, I find that in both revenue models, the platform may want to limit the precision of targeted search even if improving it is costless, with or without consumer entry.

Essays on Platform Competition and Two-sided Markets

Essays on Platform Competition and Two-sided Markets PDF Author: Robin Seung-Jin Lee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This dissertation comprises three essays on the industrial organization of platform and two-sided markets. In these networked industries, agents on one side of the market adopt, join, or visit a platform intermediary in order to access goods or services provided by agents on another side of the market. All three essays focus on environments where one side of the market consists of a small number of strategic firms, and analyze competition among platforms to get members of this oligopolistic side "on-board." The first essay provides a model of platform competition for symmetric firms that allows for general externalities across both contracting and non-contracting partners, and addresses the question of when a market will sustain a single or multiple platforms. When firms and consumers can join only one platform, the essay provide conditions under which market-tipping and market-splitting equilibria may exist, and illustrates how either outcome may still be inefficient despite the presence of contingent contracts.

The Economics of Platforms

The Economics of Platforms PDF Author: Paul Belleflamme
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108625622
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. This book explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years.

The Social Network Mixtape

The Social Network Mixtape PDF Author: Guy Aridor
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Finally, we discuss how our model highlights the importance of collecting data on user beliefs and their evolution over time both to design better recommendations and to further understand their impact.