Apple v. Pepper: Applying the Indirect Purchaser Rule to Online Platforms

Long-established antitrust precedent bars customers who buy a firm’s product through intermediaries from suing that firm for antitrust damages. In Apple Inc. v. Pepper, this “indirect purchaser rule” is brought into the smartphone age in a price-fixing dispute between technology giant Apple and iPhone users. This case will determine whether iPhone users buy smartphone applications directly from Apple through the App Store, or if Apple is merely an intermediary seller-agent of app developers. The indirect purchase rule is generally considered settled precedent. How the rule should apply to online platforms, however, differs between circuit courts, which have split on the question of how to determine which users of online marketplaces are direct purchasers and which users are indirect purchasers. Here, the Supreme Court must decide whether the app purchasers are direct purchasers of apps from Apple. If so, the plaintiff app purchasers can proceed in bringing an antitrust suit against Apple. Alternatively, the Court could decide that the consumer app purchasers are merely indirect purchasers of Apple, who actually buy apps directly from third-party software developers. In that case, Apple would be classified as a passive middleman, immune to antitrust suit by app purchasers. The Court should take the former approach and affirm the decision of the Ninth Circuit holding that consumer app purchasers have standing to sue Apple’s App Store. Otherwise, consumers will be unable to recover for potentially legitimate antitrust injuries, and Apple’s conduct will be unlikely to be challenged by another party

On Internal Knowledge Markets

In large organizations, knowledge can move rapidly or slowly, usefully or unproductively. Those who place faith in internal knowledge markets and online platforms to promote knowledge stocks and flows should understand how extrinsic incentives can crowd outintrinsic motivation

Manipulation: Online Platforms’ Inescapable Fate

Online platforms are prone to abuse and manipulation from strategic parties. For example, social media and review websites suffer from the presence of opinion spam and fake reviews. Applying the economic concept of rational expectation equilibrium (REE), we explore the impact of manipulation on consumer welfare in a Twitter-like environment. We argue that the REE outcome can be decomposed into a firm-centric effect and a rational expectation effect, and the relative strength of these effects determines the final level of manipulation. We also examine the effect of competition on firms’ manipulation levels. We find that the combination of a competition effect and a rational expectation effect determines the overall effect of competition on strategic manipulation. This research sheds light on the reliability of opinion mining, and contributes to our understanding of strategic manipulation in the context of sentiment analysis

Innovative online platforms: Research opportunities

Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues arising from five types of online platforms (resource sharing, matching, crowdsourcing, review, and crowdfunding) and presents some research opportunities for operations management scholars to explore

Polarized Speech on Online Platforms

While political polarization has increased as measured through surveys, currently we lack comprehensive, longitudinal, and ecologically valid measurement of the polarization of online political speech that spans social media platforms. Using language models, we analyze ~2.5 billion comments on Reddit and Twitter across ~1.7 million accounts from 2007-2023 and find that polarized speech has been rising on both platforms since their inception, with outgroup polarization levels higher on Twitter than Reddit. On Twitter, while U.S. politicians on the left have been consistently more polarized than everyday users, politicians on the right experienced the highest growth in polarization, overtaking journalists, media, and everyday users over the past four years. Today, politicians, the group listened to the most for their political rhetoric, are far more polarized than everyday users. Additionally, while polarized speech is typically lower for accounts with more followers, right-leaning political influencers are an exception to this trend, which may influence perceptions of polarization on the left versus the right. Polarization is more diffuse across users on Twitter than on Reddit, where it is localized to a few communities. Polarization also varies by topic, with right-leaning users twice as likely to use polarized rhetoric about immigration as left-leaning users while left-leaning users are somewhat more likely to be polarized around healthcare. Our large-scale analysis reveals previously unknown patterns of polarization across platforms, groups, and topics that will help us better contextualize polarized content and potentially intervene to reduce it

Online, on call: : the spread of digitally-organised just-in-time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non-standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT-related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.Peer reviewe

Alternative Finance Business-Models: Online Platforms

The article explores the essence of alternative finance, describes the main models of alternative financing for business and individual borrowers. The key characteristics of alternative finance models are determined and their classification according to these criteria is proposed. The analysis of the modern development of the basic models of alternative finance in the regions of the world is carried out

Data Scraping as a Cause of Action: Limiting Use of the CFAA and Trespass in Online Copying Cases

In recent years, online platforms have used claims such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) and trespass to curb data scraping, or copying of web content accomplished using robots or web crawlers. However, as the term “data scraping” implies, the content typically copied is data or information that is not protected by intellectual property law, and the means by which the copying occurs is not considered to be hacking. Trespass and the CFAA are both concerned with authorization, but in data scraping cases, these torts are used in such a way that implies that real property norms exist on the Internet, a misleading and harmful analogy. To correct this imbalance, the CFAA must be interpreted in its native context, that of computers, computer networks, and the Internet, and given contextual meaning. Alternatively, the CFAA should be amended. Because data scraping is fundamentally copying, copyright offers the correct means for litigating data scraping cases. This Note additionally offers proposals for creating enforceable terms of service online and for strengthening copyright to make it applicable to user-based online platforms