Online seminar on the Economics of Platforms

April 14, 2020 Research

The online Economics of Platforms Seminar will meet the first Tuesday of each month. 

Hosted by TSE Digital Center, this virtual seminar series is focused on the economics of platforms. Seminars can cover all aspects related to the economics of platforms including, for example, competition, strategy, design, governance, and policy issues. We hope to attract a good mix of applied theory, empirical papers, and policy discussions.

Contacts

To propose a talk, please contact one of the co-chairs of the Scientific Committee:
Andrei Hagiu: ahagiu@gmail.com or Julian Wright: wright.economics@gmail.com
To obtain a link to a seminar and to be put on our mailing list, please contact Marie-Hélène Dufour

Seminar guidelines

The speaker will present for 40 mins, 5 mins for the discussant and we will have 15 mins for Q&A. Each seminar will be moderated, and participants can post their questions to the chat room on Zoom. Questions will usually be channeled through the moderator. Participants (other than the speaker and moderator) should leave their mic off unless asked by the moderator to speak." More detailed rules will be shared in due course.

Upcoming Talks

Seminars will take place the first Tuesday of each month at 2.00 PM Toulouse Time via Zoom.
 

Tuesday, April 2, 2024: Tobias Klein (Tilburg University) "How Important are User-generated Data for Search Result Quality?" (with Madina Kurmangaliyeva, Jens Prüfer and Patricia Prüfer)
Moderator: (TBA). Discussant: Gregory Crawford (Chief Economist, Zalando, and Professor University of Zurich)

Tuesday, May 7, 2024: Tony Ke (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) "Information Design of Online Platforms" (with Song Lin and Michelle Y. Lu)
Moderator (TBA). Discussant: Andrew Rhodes (TSE)

Tuesday, June 4, 2024: Daniele Condorelli (University of Warwick), "Buyer-Optimal Platform Design" (with Balazs Szentes)
Moderator (TBA). Discussant: Alessandro Bonatti (MIT Sloan School of Management)

Tuesday, July 2, 2024: Guy Aridor (Northwestern University), "Privacy Regulation and Targeted Advertising: Evidence from Apple’s App Tracking Transparency" (with Yeon-Koo Che)
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Garrett Johnson (Boston University)

Past Talks

Tuesday, March 5, 2024: Rafael Jimenez-Duran (Bocconi University and Chicago Booth Stigler Center) "When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media" (with Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin Handel and Christopher Roth)
Moderator: Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School). Discussant: Ro'ee Levy (Tel Aviv University)
Tuesday, February 6, 2024: Jacopo Gambato (University of Mannheim, ZEW) "Platform-Enabled Information Disclosure" (with Martin Peitz)
Moderator:  David Salant (TSE). Discussant: Tat-How Teh (NTU Singapore)
Tuesday, December 5, 2023: Susumu Sato (Hitotsubashi University), "Asymmetric Platform Oligopoly" (with Martin Peitz)
Moderator: Heski Bar-Isaac (University of Toronto). Discussant: Bruno Jullien (Toulouse School of Economics)
Tuesday, November 7, 2023: Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota), "A Framework for Detection, Measurement, and Welfare: Analysis of Platform Bias" (with Imke Reimers)
Moderator: Greg Taylor (University of Oxford). Discussant: Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School)
Tuesday, October 3, 2023: Andrey Fradkin (Boston University), "Self-Preferencing at Amazon: Evidence from Search Rankings" (with Chiara Farronato and Alexander MacKay)
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota)
  • No video
Tuesday, September 5, 2023: John Horton (MIT Sloan School of Management), "Advertising as Coordination: Evidence from a Field Experiment" (with Apostolos Filippas and Diego Urraca)
Moderator: Andrey Fradkin  (Boston University-Questrom School of Business). Discussant: Pinar Yildirim (University of Pennsylvania)
Tuesday, July 4, 2023: Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon University), "The Value of External Data for Digital Platforms: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Search Suggestions" (with Xiaoxia Lei (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Yixing Chen (University of Notre Dame))
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Hannes Datta (Tilburg University)
Tuesday, June 6, 2023: Alexandre De Cornière (Toulouse School of Economics) "Third-degree Price Discrimination in Two-sided Markets" (with Andrea Mantovani (Toulouse Business School) and Shiva Shekkar (Tilburg School of Economics and Management).
Moderator: Junjie Zhou (Tsinghua University). Discussant: Chengsi Wang (Monash University)
Tuesday, May 2, 2023: Stephen Michael Impink (New York University, Stern School of Business), "Outsourcing IT and Technological Differentiation: Evidence from Digital Startups"
Moderator: Ginger Zhe Jin (University of Maryland). Discussant: Shane Greenstein (Harvard Business School).
Tuesday, April 4, 2023: Michael D. Whinston (MIT Sloan School of Management) "Tying with Network Effects", (with Jay Pil Choi and Doh-Shin Jeon)
Moderator: Alexandre De Cornière (TSE). Discussant: Vincenzo Denicolo (University of Bologna)
Tuesday, March 7, 2023: Martin Peitz (University of Mannheim), "Inflated Recommendations" (with Anton Sobolev)
Moderator: Özlem Bedre-Defolie (ESMT-Berlin).Discussant: Heski Bar-Isaac (University of Toronto)
Tuesday, February 7, 2023: Guy Aridor , "Drivers of Digital Attention: Evidence from a Social Media Experiment"
Moderator: Luis Cabral (NYU-Stern School of Business). Discussant: Pinar Yildirim (University of Pennsylvania)
Tuesday, December 6, 2022: Amelia Fletcher (University of East Anglia), "International Pro-Competition Regulation of Digital Platforms: Healthy Experimentation or Dangerous Fragmentation?
Moderator: David Salant (TSE). Discussant: Paul Belleflamme (UC Louvain)
- Tuesday, November 1, 2022: Devesh Raval (Harvard Law School), "Steering in One Click: Platform Self-Preferencing in the Amazon Buy Box"
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Leon Musolff (Microsolf Research)
- Tuesday, October 4, 2022: Mehmet Ekmekci (Boston College), Platform Competition and Interoperability: The Net Fee Model (with Alexander White and Lingxuan Wu)
Moderator: Greg Taylor (University of Oxford). Discussant: Bruno Jullien (Toulouse School of Economics)

- Tuesday, September 6, 2022: Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota) "GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps" (with Rebecca Janben, Reinhold Kesler and Michael E. Kummer)
Moderator: Ginger Zhe Jin (University of Maryland). Discussant: Christian Peukert (Universit of Lausanne)
- August 2022: Holiday break
 
- Tuesday, July 26, 2022: Ulrich Laitenberger (Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris), "Bye-box: An Analysis of Non-Promotion on the Amazon Marketplace" (with Matthias Hunold and Guillaume Thébaudin)
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Devesh Raval (Federal Trade Commission)
- Tuesday, July 12, 2022: Leonardo Madio (University of Padova), "Platform Liability and Innovation" (with Doh-Shin Jeon and Yassine Lefouili)
Moderator: Greg Taylor (University of Oxford). Discussant: Xinyu Hua (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- Tuesday, June 28, 2022: Andrey Fradkin (Boston University), "Do Incentives to Review Help the Market? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Airbnb" (with David Holtz)
Moderator: Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School). Discussant: Tobias Klein (Tilburg University)
  • Watch the video
- Tuesday, June 14, 2022: Michael Sockin (University of Texas at Austin), "Decentralization Through Tokenization" (with Wei Xiong)
Moderator: Julian Wright (National University of Singapore). Discussant: Hanna Halaburda (NYU-Stern) 
- Tuesday, May 31, 2022: Meng Liu (Washington University in St Louis), Designing Quality Certificates: Insights from eBay (With Xiang Hui and Ginger Zhe Jin)
Moderator: Andrey Fradkin (Boston University). Discussant: Michael Luca (Harvard Business School)
- Tuesday, May 17, 2022: Katryn Spier (Harvard Law School), Holding Platforms Liable (with Xinyu Hua)
Moderator: Andrei Hagiu (Boston University). Discussant: Yassine Lefouili (Toulouse School of Economics)
- Tuesday, May 3, 2022: Zhijun Chen (Monash University), Privacy Costs and Consumer Data Acquisition: An Economic Analysis of Data Privacy Regulation
Moderator: Alexandre de Cornière (Toulouse School of Economics). Discussant: Jay Pil Choi (Michigan State University)
- Tuesday, April 19, 2022: Leon Musolff (Princeton University), Entry Into Two-Sided Markets Shaped By Platform-Guided Search (with Kwok Hao Lee)
Moderator: Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School). Discussant: Michael Dinerstein (University of Chicago)
- Tuesday, April 5, 2022: Yao Cui (Cornell University), Should Gig Platforms Decentralize Dispute Resolution? (with Wee Kiat Lee)
Moderator: Greg Taylor (University of Oxford). Discussant: Andrei Hagiu (Boston University) 
- Tuesday, March 22, 2022: Renata Gaineddenova (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Pricing and Efficiency in a Decentralized Ride-Hailing Platform
Moderator: Feng Zhu (Harvard Business School). Discussant: Alex Smolin (Toulouse School of Economics)
- Tuesday, March 8, 2022: Ben Casner (Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission), Content-Hosting Platforms: Discovery, Membership, or Both? (with Tat-How Teh)
Moderator: Alexandre De Cornière (Toulouse School of Economics). Discussant: Pinar Yildirim (The Wharton School)

- Tuesday, February 22, 2022: Huan Tang (London School of Economics), The Supply and Demand for Data Privacy: Evidence from Mobile Apps (with Bo Bian and Xinchen Ma)
Moderator: Tiffany Tsai (NUS). Discussant: Jorge Padilla (Compass Lexecon)
 
- Tuesday, February 8, 2022: Tobias Salz (MIT), The Economic Consequences of Data Privacy Regulation: Empirical Evidence from GDPR with Guy Aridor and Yeon-Koo Che.
Moderator: Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School). Discussant: Johnson Garrett (Boston University)
- Tuesday, January 25, 2022: Federico Etro (Florence School of Economics and Management), Hybrid Marketplace with Free Entry of Sellers
Moderator: Özlem Bedre-Defolie (ESMT-Berlin). Discussant: Yusuke Zennyo (Kobe University)
- Tuesday, January 11, 2022: Allen Vong (University of Macau), Perverse Ethical Concerns: Online Misinformation and Offline Conflicts (with Dongkyu Chang)
Moderator: Greg Taylor (University of Oxford). Discussant: Sunny Huang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
- Talks of 2020-2021 academic year: list here
 

Scientific Committee

Co-chairs: Jacques Crémer (Toulouse School of Economics), Andrei Hagiu (Boston University), Julian Wright (National University of Singapore)

MembersReiko Aoki (Japan Fair Trade Commission (Tokyo)), Heski Bar-Isaac (University of Toronto), Özlem Bedre-Defolie (ESMT-Berlin), Luis Cabral (NYU-Stern School of Business), Jay Pil Choi (Michigan State University), Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School), Alexandre De Cornière (TSE), Amelia Fletcher (University of East Anglia), Andrey Fradkin (Boston University-Questrom School of Business), Hanna Halaburda (NYU-Stern School of Business), Shota Ichihashi (Queen’s University), Doh-Shin Jeon (TSE), Ginger Zhe Jin (University of Maryland), David Salant (TSE), Alex Smolin (TSE) Yossi, Spiegel (Tel Aviv University), Greg Taylor (University of Oxford), Tiffany Tsai (National University of Singapore), Junjie Zhou (Tsinghua University).