We analyze the data collection strategies of 65,000 developers in the market for mobile applications and track 300,000 applications over four years. Many apps belong to developers with multiple apps. This fact generates variation in the privacy behaviors of the same developer for our analysis....

We analyze the impact of information on Wikipedia on tourists' choices for travel destinations. Our results suggest a strong observational correlation between the amount of content on Wikipedia and tourist overnight stays. We propose a check of whether this correlation is causal. For that, we...

In this paper, we address the impact of surging unemployment on online public good provision. Specifically, we ask how drastically increased unemployment affects voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We put together a monthly country-level data set, which...

Do contributions to online content platforms induce a feedback loop of ever more user-generated content or will they discourage future contributions? To assess this, we use a randomized field experiment which added content to some pages in Wikipedia while leaving similar pages unchanged. We find...

Policy makers are increasingly concerned about the combination of market power and massive data collection in digital markets. This concern is fueled by the theoretical prediction that more market power causes firms to collect ever more data from their users. We investigate the relationship...

Economic restructuring provides an opportunity for socially valuable product and process innovation. However, it's not clear whether displaced workers engage in socially useful activities as well. This question is particularly pressing when the advancement of computer technology creates the...

We document a causal influence of online user-generated information on realworld economic outcomes. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional information on Wikipedia about cities affects tourists' choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding...

Online labor markets experienced a rapid growth in recent years. They allow for long-distance transactions and offer workers access to a potentially 'global' pool of labor demand. As such, they bear the potential to act as a substitute for shrinking local income opportunities. Using detailed...

In this paper, we address the impact of surging unemployment on online public good provision. Specifically, we ask how drastically increased unemployment affects voluntary contributions of content to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We put together a monthly country-level data set, which...

Endogeneity in network formation hinders the identification of the role social networks play in generating spillovers, peer effects and other externalities. This paper tackles this problem and investigates how the link network between articles on the German Wikipedia influences the attention and...