Feedback is central to many platforms and organizations, yet it often departs from objective quality. We study a systematic component of this gap that we call feedback culture. Feedback culture is governed by two policy levers: how readily the platform awards positive feedback (leniency) and how readily it issues negative feedback (harshness). We develop and estimate a structural model of equilibrium participation and feedback using Stack Overflow and a policy change that increased voting incentives and shifted baseline feedback. Counterfactual analysis reveals that high-quality contributors prefer a less lenient and more harsh culture than low-quality contributors. This pattern arises in equilibrium because feedback culture changes competition for recognition and changes what feedback reveals about quality. Leniency and harshness can be complements. Increasing both raises top-contributor participation by 9.36% compared with adjusting leniency alone. Optimal feedback culture varies with context and with the platform's objective.

This article examines endogenous consumer reviews and their impacts on seller pricing on Steam, an online video game platform. We find that discounts generate a positive post-promotion effect on sales through review accumulation process. We build and estimate a structural model that incorporates endogenous consumer reviews and forward-looking game sellers. Counterfactual results demonstrate that without accounting for the effects of reviews, game prices would be 14% higher. We quantify that the reviews have great externalities. The whole system generates millions in surplus for both parties, particularly benefiting new and indie game sellers, while further fostering market diversity.

This paper studies the consequences of privacy regulation by exploiting Google’s 2019 data-access restriction for a major Indian FinTech lender. We document a key trade-off of privacy regulation in digital credit markets: strengthened privacy protections raise loan applications, consistent with higher demand, yet induce tighter screening, reflecting an overall contraction in credit supply. This credit contraction disproportionately excludes economically and socially marginalized applicants. Linking to economy-wide credit bureau records, we quantify the "FinTech ladder effect" whereby initial digital credit access serves as a gateway to broader formal credit. Privacy-induced rejection reduces the probability of obtaining any formal credit by 13.7 percentage points even four years later. Using a structural model, we decompose the welfare effects of privacy regulation and show that the regulation generates a 0.23-0.60% increase in consumer surplus while reducing lender profits by 20-23%.