Searching for Results: Optimal Platform Design in a Network Setting

Large online platforms, like Airbnb or Amazon Marketplace, increasingly direct users to internal search engines that limit the number of sellers consumers observe. We show that such behaviour is consistent with profit maximisation. To do so, we model buyer-seller interactions as a series bipartite graphs, which are each realised with a probability chosen by the platform owner. Prominent players disproportionately increase competition, which decreases prices. To maximise profit, the platform owner ensures that buyers only observe a consistent number of sellers in every state of the world realised with positive probability. When products are vertically differentiated, the platform owner biases observation towards high-quality products, but doing so reduces prices, and, as a result, the optimal number of sellers in the network. The extent to which platforms in different markets highlight high-quality products and the number of sellers their search processes show is a function of both quality dispersion and substitutability

Third-Degree Price Discrimination in the Age of Big Data

A platform holds information on the demographics of its users and wants maximise total surplus. The data generates a probability over which of two products a buyer prefers, with different data segmentations being more or less informative. The platform reveals segmentations of the data to two firms, one popular and one niche, preferring to reveal no information than completely revealing the consumer's type for certain. The platform can improve profits by revealing to both firms a segmentation where the niche firm is relatively popular, but still less popular than the other firm, potentially doing even better by revealing information asymmetrically. The platform has an incentive to provide more granular data in markets in which the niche firm is particularly unpopular or in which broad demographic categories are not particularly revelatory of type, suggesting that the profit associated with big data techniques differs depending on market characteristics

Rating the Competition: Seller Ratings and Intra-Platform Competition

Product ratings are commonplace on large online platforms, like Airbnb and Amazon Marketplace. One use for these ratings is to order search results. Platform owners are able to choose the extent to which ratings can be used to determine the probability a given seller is observed by a sets of buyers. Since demand is higher for high quality products, there is an incentive to increase the probability that highly-rated sellers are observed by biasing search results towards them. However, biasing search results in this way results in competition being more concentrated, reducing prices. The extent to which it is profitable to use ratings as a means of ordering search results depends on the properties of the market(s) the platform operates in

Wilson v. United States: The Narrow Line between Innis and Edwards

This article is part of the District of Columbia Surve

Thompson v. United States: Limiting the Scope of the Exclusionary Rule

This article is part of the District of Columbia Surve

MS

thesisThe results of previous research dealing with bereavement and /or depression in the elderly give conflicting and ambiguous reports. The purpose of this study was to attempt to clarify some of this confusion. Depression is a normal part of grieving. Many investigators suggest that depression is also a normal part of aging. This investigator described and compared the severity of depression between a sample of elderly person (N=62) who recently experience conjugal loss and a matched group a still-married older person (N=59). The two samples were utilized in order to describe the extent of depression as an outcome of grief, as well as the degree of which depression may exist among those elderly who have a spouse. Data were taken from a larger project on bereavement and adaptation in the elderly. Data from the bereaved sample were obtained three to four weeks post-conjugal loss. The Zung subscales were analyzed for highest levels of depression. Selected demographic variables were examined for their effect on bereavement and depression. While the bereaved shoed higher levels of depression, neither group manifested clinical levels of depression. Using a Tau C measure of association, a statistically significant relationship was found between bereavement and depression for nearly every variable and every subscale. These preliminary findings led to speculation regarding those elderly at higher risk when conjugal loss occurred. Implications for nursing were discussed

Thompson v. United States: Limiting the Scope of the Exclusionary Rule

This article is part of the District of Columbia Surve