In the mid 1990s, Virtual Communities (VCs) were described as a very promising internet-based business model. After the shake-out of the so-called New Economy only a few commercially-oriented Virtual Communities have survived. Many assertions and principles regarding important components and distinct strategies of Virtual Communities have not been empirically substantiated. This paper proposes ...

In less than a decade, sharing economy platforms have fostered competition and redefined industry boundaries in a range of businesses. Two sharing economy pioneers—Uber and Airbnb—are now well-known global giants and leading players in the sector, which is estimated to reach $335 billion by 2025.3 At the other end of the spectrum are small startups focusing on different niches; several hundreds...

Does the CPI Overstate Increases in the Cost of Living? of the biases due to substitution than on the biases due to quality change and the introduction of new goods. Furthermore, the biases associated with substitution are quantitatively small. Second, while quality change and the introduction of new goods potentially pose big problems for the CPI, there is very little hard empirical evidence t...

This paper analyzes housing price dynamics in and outside of Telecom Corridor, a region near Dallas, Texas, with a high concentration of new economy firms. Using separate home price indexes in and outside this region, the paper tests whether home values are more volatile in the new economy area and compares mean-variance efficient portfolio weights on housing. The problem of hedging housing pri...

A major challenge for Agreement Technologies is the combination of existing technologies and reasoning methods. In this paper we focus on the three core layers of the Agreement Technologies tower, called Norms, Organization and Argumentation. We present a framework for arguing about agreements based on norms, roles and dependence, together with a case study from the sharing economy.

The search theory approach to understanding unemployment flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. It has provided economists with a rich set of models for analyzing unemployment and labor market issues more generally. Unfortunately, while economists have found modern search theory to be an invaluable tool, the insights provided by this approach remain largely unfamiliar to noneconomists. This rev...

There has been a growing recognition among scholars that politics matters in the distribution of resources in society. However, attempts to use a political economy ‘lens’ with which to explore causes of poverty and strategies for poverty alleviation have largely ignored elites. By failing to embrace the crucial role elites play in the implementation of pro-poor policy, existing research has not...

In the presence of a peer-to-peer economy, the option of sharing an item is valuable for consumers. By retaining control over the shareability of its products a monopolist can set a sharing tariff in conjunction with the purchase price of the product, in order to extract state-contingent surplus from consumers: the shareability rent. Using an overlapping-generations model with heterogeneous con...

The search theory approach to understanding unemployment flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. It has provided economists with a rich set of models for analyzing unemployment and labor market issues more generally. Unfortunately, while economists have found modern search theory to be an invaluable tool, the insights provided by this approach remain largely unfamiliar to noneconomists. This rev...

Electronic business (e-business) had been popularly lauded as “new economy.” As results, firms are prompted to invest heavily in e-business related activities such as supplier/procurement and online exchanges. Whether those investments have actually paid off for those firms remain largely unknown. Using the data on the top 100 e-business leaders compiled by InternetWeek, we compare the leaders ...