research
research
Working papers
Excessive Content Moderation
R&R at the RAND Journal of Economics
NET Institute Working paper
Unregulated online platforms often host extreme and socially undesirable content. As mainstream platforms tighten moderation, some users shift to unmoderated alternatives, leading to a leakage of extreme content. I develop a duopoly model where an ad-funded mainstream platform competes with an unmoderated fringe. Heterogeneous users choose platforms and create content reflecting their views. The mainstream platform trades off attracting fringe users with making content safer for advertisers. With strong network effects, the socially optimal moderation is more lenient than the profit-maximizing one. Therefore, regulation mandating stricter moderation may backfire by increasing overall content unsafety.
Presented at 2026 Centre for Competition Policy Annual Conference,* 2026 Network of Industrial Economists Symposium,* 2025 TILEC - Economic Governance of Social Media, 2025 EARIE, U. Autónoma de Barcelona Microlab Workshop, 2025 Economics of Digitization Workshop, U. Pablo de Olavide seminar, EU Commision's JRC Workshop, 2024 Jornadas de Economía Industrial, 2024 Spanish Association of Law and Economics Meeting, 2024 ENTER (Brussels)
Centrality as a Merger Defense
This paper studies horizontal mergers in a production network. I show that greater downstream centrality -- the extent to which other sectors rely, directly or indirectly, on a sector's output -- reduces the cost synergy required for a merger to be pro-competitive when final-demand elasticity exceeds the elasticity of substitution in production.
Presented at 2026 EARIE*, 2026 Barcelona School of Economics Jamboree, 2025 Spanish Association of Law and Economics Meeting, 2025 Jornadas de Economía Industrial
Work in progress
Piracy is central to digital markets, where identical content can be accessed legally or through unauthorized channels. While easier piracy seems likely to intensify competition and lower prices, it also affects profitability and entry. We develop a circular-city model with free entry in which consumers choose jointly between content and access mode. When piracy becomes more costly, prices rise for a fixed number of firms, but entry also increases, pushing prices down. Thus, prices rise with piracy costs in less competitive markets, with high entry costs and low substitutability, but become inverse-U shaped in more competitive markets, where induced entry eventually dominates.
Presented at 2026 Jornadas de Economía Industrial*