Julie Holland Mortimer

My research addresses the role that digital technology plays in retailing and distributing products, and the impact that it has on firm incentives, inter-firm relationships, and consumers. This area of research is important not only because digital technology affects a growing set of product markets, but also because the nature of digital technology allows for the construction of much more granular data than researchers and firms have historically been able to access. In my research, I identify three broad impacts of digital technology in retail and distribution settings. First, it creates opportunities to adopt more sophisticated contractual arrangements between firms in supply chains. Second, it changes the tools that firms use when designing stocking policies and choosing product availability. Third, it alters the incentives to create information goods. More recently, I have also begun extensive work studying the market for advertising, which is another crucial input for distributing products that has been upended by digital technology. Each of these four areas address long-standing problems in economics, on which the field of industrial organization (IO) has struggled to provide convincing empirical evidence. An important contribution of my work is the collection of new and detailed data that enable us to analyze these issues from an empirical perspective. I combine these new data sources with thoughtful economic models to understand how technology impacts the ways in which firms bring products to the market place.