• Working Papers

"Data, Targeted Advertising and the Quality of Journalism: The Case of Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP)", joint with Doh-Shin Jeon, Job Market Paper

This paper studies how newspapers’ adoption of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP), a publishing format for mobile devices enabling instant loading of web pages, changes data allocation and thereby newspapers’ incentive to invest in the quality of journalism when consumer data is used for targeted advertising. The adoption of AMP allows Google to obtain consumer data from AMP articles and to combine it with other sources of consumer data to improve the targeting of the advertisements served by Google on other websites. Even if such data combination increases static efficiency, it can reduce dynamic efficiency when it lowers the ad revenue per newspaper traffic and thereby reduces the quality of journalism. Newspapers face a collective action problem as a newspaper’s adoption of AMP generates negative externalities to other newspapers through data leakage. In addition to leveraging its search monopoly power, Google can use a divide-and-conquer strategy to induce newspapers to adopt AMP. We provide policy remedies.

"Vertical Integration and Foreclosure in Two-Sided Markets"

This paper studies vertical foreclosure issue in platforms characterized by bilateral cross-group network externalities. I focus on an environment where the monopolistic platform and downstream sellers face uncertainty over the gains from trade at the contracting stage. As the random shock is non-contractible, contracting creates friction which distorts the platform’s pricing structure. By contrast, vertical integration mitigates this problem by allowing the platform to incorporate the random shock in consumer pricing. Due to the interaction between transaction friction and cross-group network externalities, I find that vertical integration could reduce the platform’s incentive of foreclosure.

• Work-in-Progress

Digital Copyright: Search Engine’s Use of Snippets

E-commerce Platforms and Inflation Pass-through, Joint with Luise Eisfeld and Li Yu

Interoperability Issue of Competing Super Apps