Research

Abstract: Many digital platforms, including Uber, eBay, and YouTube, use seller rewards programs as motivators. This paper presents an empirical framework for assessing the impact of such rewards programs on platform revenue. The context is a Korean livestreaming platform, where sellers (called streamers) broadcast content, receive tips from viewers, and get commission discount rewards through performance-based tournaments. I collect microdata on efforts, revenues, and program acceptance, and I estimate a dynamic model to describe the effect of program design on streamers' behavior. Counterfactual simulations reveal that commission discount can increase total tipping revenue by encouraging streamers—especially more profitable ones—to stream more, but it makes the platform take substantially less share from the revenue. These simulations identify opportunities to raise platform revenue by reducing the commission discount benefit or reallocating approval slots across different broadcasting categories.

Abstract: This paper empirically studies how consumers' concern about privacy affects their behavior. Using panel survey data from South Korea that followed 5,328 individuals for four years, I find that privacy concern has a significant negative effect on social networking service usage. I additionally find that such concern has heterogeneous effects on online shopping behavior, but cloud storage services remain unaffected. When privacy-related news such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018 increases privacy concern, it harms not only Facebook but also other firms in the industry (e.g. Twitter). Because a private firm does not internalize such negative spillovers, the chosen privacy protection level could be different from the social optimum. From this standpoint, privacy-protecting regulation by governments may improve social welfare.

Abstract: In this article, we develop a command, xthenreg, that implements the first-differenced generalized method of moments estimation of the dynamic panel threshold model that Seo and Shin (2016, Journal of Econometrics) proposed. Furthermore, we derive the asymptotic variance formula for a kink-constrained generalized method of moments estimator of the dynamic threshold model and provide an estimation algorithm. We also propose a fast bootstrap algorithm to implement the bootstrap for the linearity test. We illustrate the use of xthenreg through a Monte Carlo simulation and an economic application.