Related papers: Mechanisms of intermediary platforms
Recent research in industrial organisation has investigated the essential place that middlemen have in the networks that make up our global economy. In this paper we attempt to understand how such middlemen compete with each other through a…
Cross-group externalities and network effects in two-sided platform markets shape market structure and competition policy, and are the subject of extensive study. Less understood are the within-group externalities that arise when the…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
Modern online platforms such as marketplaces, ride-hailing services, and food-delivery systems serve a dual role: they are both markets where participants interact and transact, and operators that design and govern how these markets…
Competition between traditional platforms is known to improve user utility by aligning the platform's actions with user preferences. But to what extent is alignment exhibited in data-driven marketplaces? To study this question from a…
Matching, capturing allocation of items to unit-demand buyers, or tasks to workers, or pairs of collaborators, is a central problem in economics. Indeed, the growing prevalence of matching-based markets, many of which online in nature, has…
We study a dynamic market setting where an intermediary interacts with an unknown large sequence of agents that can be either sellers or buyers: their identities, as well as the sequence length $n$, are decided in an adversarial, online…
The rapid growth of the digital platform economy is transforming labor markets, offering new employment opportunities with promises of flexibility and accessibility. However, these benefits often come at the expense of increased economic…
Search and matching increasingly takes place on online platforms. These platforms have elements of centralized and decentralized matching; platforms can alter the search process for its users, but are unable to eliminate search frictions…
We study decentralized markets with the presence of middlemen, modeled by a non-cooperative bargaining game in trading networks. Our goal is to investigate how the network structure of the market and the role of middlemen influence the…
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) generates a significant amount of data that contains valuable knowledge for system operations and business opportunities. Since the data is the property of the IoT data owners, the access to…
The overwhelming success of the web 2.0, with online social networks as key actors, has induced a paradigm shift in the nature of human interactions. The user-driven character of these services for the first time has allowed researchers to…
Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, has been broached as a means to decentralize the power of social media platforms and enhance user agency. Middleware may enable a more user-centric and democratic…
In the digital economy, technological innovations make it cheaper to produce high-quality content. For example, generative AI tools reduce costs for creators who develop content to be distributed online, but can also reduce production costs…
The evolution of the Internet has manifested itself in many ways: the traffic characteristics, the interconnection topologies and the business relationships among the autonomous components. It is important to understand why (and how) this…
Surfing on the internet boom, the digital marketing industry has seen an exponential growth in the recent years and is often at the origin of the financial success of the biggest tech firms. In this paper we study the current landscape of…
Social e-commerce, as a new form of social computing based marketing platforms, utilizes existing real-world social relationships for promotions and sales of products. It has been growing rapidly in recent years and attracted tens of…
"Data" is becoming an indispensable production factor, just like land, infrastructure, labor or capital. As part of this, a myriad of applications in different sectors require huge amounts of information to feed models and algorithms…
Professional networks are a key determinant of individuals' labor market outcomes. They may also play a role in either exacerbating or ameliorating inequality of opportunity across demographic groups. In a theoretical model of professional…
Our work introduces the effect of supply/demand imbalances into the literature on online matching with stochastic rewards in bipartite graphs. We provide a parameterized definition that characterizes instances as over- or undersupplied (or…