Work in Progress

Substituting Away? The Effect of Platform Bargaining Regulation on Content Display (Working Paper, available upon request)

As digital platforms become increasingly prominent in the economy, governments are seeking effective methods to regulate them. Due to information asymmetry between platforms and regulators, implementing a top-down approach to regulation, such as imposing a transaction price, is difficult. This paper presents evidence on the effects of an alternative bottom-up bargaining-based approach to regulation by evaluating the Australian Mandatory News Media Bargaining Code. The Bargaining Code requires platforms to bargain with domestic news providers and compensate them for displaying their content. Using a difference-in-differences approach and detailed data on Google News, this study demonstrates that the code significantly affects the news composition on the platform. In particular, larger foreign publishers increase their share of the content displayed, while their larger domestic counterparts experience a decrease in their share.

Media coverage: The Conversation
Short presentation: https://youtu.be/S8c0o5a5HPA?t=221 

Platform Design, Harassment, and Productivity (Work in Progress)