Research
Two themes, one question: how do platforms shape markets?
Our research program runs on two tracks — how platforms are governed, and how they perform — spanning the design decisions that give platforms their power and the consequences those decisions carry.
1 · Platform governance
The rules that shape platform ecosystems — policy and market design, the governance of complementors, and content and conduct moderation. We study how platforms set and enforce rules, the strategic tension between growing a platform and controlling it, and platform envelopment.
Governance also reaches beyond the app. We examine the regulation of digital markets and the spillovers of platforms onto cities and housing, labor and gig work, and discrimination in peer-to-peer settings — from short-term rentals to ride-hailing.
2 · Platform performance
What makes a marketplace actually work? We study search, ranking, recommendation, and pricing as design levers that determine whether a two-sided market reaches liquidity, how quickly it matches the two sides, and how surplus is split between them.
Performance rests on trust. Reviews, star ratings, verification badges, and Superhost-style certification are the institutions that let strangers transact at scale — we study how these signals form, how they drive match quality and growth through network effects, and when they help versus mislead.