Policy and Competition Issues in Online Markets

This group of projects examines a range of diverse issues related to ecommerce and online service provision that reflect the increasingly intertwined nature of competition between online providers and their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts. This includes (1) assessing the drivers of success of non-traditional, online mortgage lenders, such as targeted advertising, and their impact on the broader industry, (2) quantifying the impact of Amazon.com’s logistics network expansion on local labor markets and competition in package delivery, including assessing the value generated by improved delivery for third party sellers on the Amazon platform, and (3) studying the likely impacts of recent policy initiatives to limit price obfuscation or “drip pricing” by online platforms, primarily in the hospitality space. Please indicate if you are interested in a particular question among these three.