Online environment is now part of everyday life. However, trust is still an important issue for online merchants. This explains why there is an increasing interest in "trust busters" by the general consumer. Trust busters entail, among other, a thorough online privacy policy (OPP) that encompasses detailed privacy and security statements. The paper looks at both the views of the consumer and th...

BIP70 is a community-accepted Payment Protocol standard that governs how merchants and customers perform payments in Bitcoin. This standard is supported by most major wallets and the two dominant Payment Processors: Coinbase and BitPay, who collectively provide the infrastructure for accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment to more than 100,000 merchants. In this paper, we present new attacks on ...

We estimate a structural model of a sponsored search auction model. To accommodate the “position paradox”, we relax the assumption of decreasing click volumes with position ranks, which is often assumed in the literature. Using data from “Website X”, one of the largest online marketplaces in China, we find that merchants of different qualities adopt different bidding strategies: high quality me...

We examine online affiliate marketing programs in which merchants oversee thousands of affiliates they have never met. Some merchants hire outside specialists to set and enforce policies for affiliates, while other merchants ask their ordinary marketing staff to perform these functions. For clear violations of applicable rules, we find that outside specialists are most effective at excluding th...

We estimate a structural model of sponsored search auctions at “Website X”, one of the largest online marketplaces in China. We use the estimates to address the distributional and revenue impact of “scoring” the auction, which is a way for shopping websites to reward larger merchants (by penalizing smaller merchants). We find evidence of horizontal differentiation in preferences, as merchants o...

We study the ability of banks and merchants to influence the consumer’s payment instrument choice. Consumers participate in payment card networks to insure themselves against three types of shocks— income, theft, and their merchant match. Merchants choose which payment instruments to accept based on their production costs and increased profit opportunities. Our key results can be summarized as ...

Recent controversies in campaign finance have generated concerns that wealthy donors will dominate the political landscape, with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission1 and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission2 standing as the high-water marks in the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudential turn towards deregulation. This short Essay puts this case law in perspective by briefly explain...

A frican economies export primary commodities, and most export little else. Policymakers as well as economists and historians of African economic development have seen these exports as both a hope and a curse. The following parable tells the story: Once upon a time, a servant of the ruler discovered a miraculous plant, which grew readily in that country, and whose seeds could be woven into fine...

A frican economies export primary commodities, and most export little else. Policymakers as well as economists and historians of African economic development have seen these exports as both a hope and a curse. The following parable tells the story: Once upon a time, a servant of the ruler discovered a miraculous plant, which grew readily in that country, and whose seeds could be woven into fine...

This paper develops a dynamic model of an economy with search frictions in which homogeneous agents choose between specializing as producers or as merchants, and can change occupation at any time. Merchants operate alongside a decentralized search market and provide immediacy in trade in return for a price. Agents who know the location of a merchant have the option of paying the merchant’s pric...