Essays on Economics of Online Platforms

Abstract

In this dissertation, I study the economics of online platforms. I explore economic consequences of the interaction between firms and users through online platforms. I investigate three aspects of such interactions through data-driven economic models: mobile economy, online crowd, and social media. I study the effect of platform design on demand and monetizing online traffic. First, I study the impact of emerging mobile ecosystem on users' interaction patterns. Specifically, I choose the online shopping platform in which users have two channels to purchase the products: PC and App. I investigate whether niche products are more likely to be seen and selected in mobile channel. I also look into customers' usage patterns to draw conclusions on how to increase sales of niche products. Second, I study the online crowdfunding and the effect of the campaign design on overall success. I build a structural model to estimate the demand for Kickstarter projects and make conclusions on the effect of reward scheme designs. Third, I explore the sponsored videos on Facebook. A sponsored content (e.g. video) features the sponsor's brand or product. I study the effect of the creator-sponsor association on viewership and user engagement for videos on Facebook. More specifically, I identify multiple aspects of creator-sponsor association and investigate their effect on the overall user engagement. I highlight the managerial implications of the findings in this dissertation.