Related papers: Separating Advertising and Marketplace Functions o…

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…

Advertising becomes one of the most popular ways of monetizing an online transaction platform. Usually, sponsored advertisements are posted on the most attractive positions to enhance the number of clicks. However, multiple e-commerce…

Over the past several decades, major social media platforms have become crucial channels for e-commerce retailers to connect with consumers, maintain engagement, and promote their offerings. While some retailers focus their efforts on a few…

Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate exchanges between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Aiming to protect consumers and guarantee fair competition on platforms, legislators increasingly require that…

Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…

E-commerce platforms are rolling out ambitious targeted advertising initiatives that rely on merchants sharing customer data with each other via the platform. Yet current platform designs fail to address participating merchants' concerns…

In e-commerce, ranking the search results based on users' preference is the most important task. Commercial e-commerce platforms, such as, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Walmart, etc. perform extensive and relentless research to perfect their…

When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in…

This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…

In e-commerce platforms, sponsored and non-sponsored content are jointly displayed to users and both may interactively influence their engagement behavior. The former content helps advertisers achieve their marketing goals and provides a…

Ad targeting is getting more powerful with introduction of new tools, such as Custom Audiences, behavioral targeting, and Audience Insights. Although this is beneficial for businesses as it enables people to receive more relevant…

E-commerce platforms usually present an ordered list, mixed with several organic items and an advertisement, in response to each user's page view request. This list, the outcome of ad auction and allocation processes, directly impacts the…

Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…

In contemporary e-commerce platforms, search result pages display two types of items: ad items and organic items. Ad items are determined through an advertising auction system, while organic items are selected by a recommendation system.…

Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…

We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…

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 consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…

Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…

Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…