We analyze the relationship between unemployment and the supply of online labor for microtasking. Using detailed US data from a large microtasking platform between 2011 and2015, we study the participation and the number of hours supplied by workers in the US.We find that more individuals...

We analyze whether an informal second channel for communication can improve the efficiency of knowledge transfer in an electronic network of practice. We explore this question by analyzing the effect of chat rooms in the well-known Q&A forum Stack Overflow. We identify the causal effect using a...

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have both incentives and possibilities to detect such agreements on their own initiative...

We study the role of privacy in the market for mobile applications. For such programs used with smartphones and tablet PCs a very important market has emerged. Yet, neither the role of privacy on that market is well understood, nor do we have empirical evidence regarding its role therein. We...

The majority of industrial organizations literature on network externalities looks at firm behavior under given market characteristics. The present paper instead asks the question whether the presence of network externalities can change market characteristics, specifically, whether an initially...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We study the effects of improvements in eBay’s rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did not lead to...

This paper provides an overview of telecommunications regulation in the U.S. and in Europe. For each region the history of telecommunications regulations as well as the current regulatory regime is portrayed. The focus of this overview is on the question of how unbundling regulations in the...

We shed light on a money-for-privacy trade-off in the market for smartphone applications (“apps”). Developers offer their apps cheaper in return for greater access to personal information, and consumers choose between lower prices and more privacy. We provide evidence for this pattern using...

This paper examines the publication of quality indicators in service markets with public finance systems, such as education and healthcare markets. We provide a spatial model of product differentiation in which the reporting of such indicators increases consumers’ decision weight on quality...