Digital Platforms & the Platform Economy
Understanding how platforms create, capture, and govern value.
Platform Research studies the strategy, design, and social consequences of digital platforms — from peer-to-peer marketplaces and the sharing economy to reputation systems, network effects, and platform governance.
Focus areas
What we study
Platform governance
The rules that shape platform ecosystems — policy and market design, complementor relationships, moderation, and the regulation of digital markets.
Platform performance
How platforms measure and improve performance — liquidity, match quality, growth, and the metrics that separate thriving marketplaces from stalling ones.
Platforms we study
Latest
Recent work
Reputation Signals and Host Behavior in Peer-to-Peer Markets
A study of how certification badges change the pricing and quality decisions of platform hosts, using a staggered difference-in-differences design.
The Thickening of Thin Markets: Design Levers on Two-Sided Platforms
How search visibility, default ranking, and messaging frictions jointly determine whether a marketplace reaches liquidity.