Economics of Internet Markets

该奖项资助调查市场研究中基本问题的研究。买家如何应对价格和销售机制的变化？销售机制是如何随着时间演变的？贸易量如何对销售税的变化作出反应？研究人员在使用丰富数据的大型互联网市场的背景下解决了这些问题。在过去的十年里，互联网市场和平台的规模和重要性急剧上升。越来越多的零售商业、广告、社交活动、求职和金融交易在网上进行。这些新的在线市场有哪些新颖之处？我们能从互联网公司收集的大量详细数据中了解个人行为、竞争和市场力量吗？这个项目研究了一系列与在线商务相关的问题，以及更普遍的在线行为。该团队解决了三个具体问题：(1)如何利用在线市场中频繁发生的实验来了解消费者行为和市场结果；(2)哪些类型的销售机制在网上市场是有效的，以及在过去十年中是如何演变的；(3)税收政策对网络商务的影响和网络贸易的地理分布。该项目的另一个目标是开发和说明一些研究策略，这些策略可能广泛适用于经济学家使用互联网公司的“大数据”来研究个人行为和市场互动。我们怀疑，这类数据的使用可能会在经济学和社会科学研究中得到广泛应用，并将需要新的工具和方法。所描述的策略包括将点击流和列表数据纳入经济分析的方法，以及有效处理大型互联网市场固有的规模和异质性。这项研究将产生更广泛的影响，为几个具有实质性政策利益的问题提供新的答案。目前，互联网销售税政策的影响在州和联邦层面都受到了积极的争论。我们还研究了有关零售市场竞争程度的问题，以及这些市场中摩擦的类型，这些问题通常与竞争政策有关。最后，我们提供了一系列关于消费者行为的证据，仅在美国就有数千万参与者，这是研究消费者心理和复杂性假设最活跃的环境之一。随着行为经济学对公共政策的影响越来越大，这类证据变得越来越重要。

This award funds research investigating basic questions in the study of markets. How do buyers respond to changes in prices and sales mechanisms? How do selling mechanisms evolve over time? How does the volume of trade respond to changes in sales taxes? The researchers address these questions in the context of a large internet marketplace using rich data. The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the scale and importance of internet markets and platforms. Increasingly, retail commerce, advertising, social activity, job search and financial transactions take place online. What features of these new online markets are novel? What can we learn about individual behavior, competition and market forces from the vast and detailed data being collected by internet companies? This project studies a range of questions related to online commerce, and online behavior more generally. The team addresses three specific questions: (1) how to use the frequent experimentation that occurs in online markets to learn about consumer behavior and market outcomes; (2) what types of sales mechanisms are effective in online markets and how has that evolved over the last decade; (3) what are the implications of tax policy for online commerce and the geographic distribution of online trade.An additional goal for this project is to develop and illustrate some research strategies that may be broadly applicable for economists using 'big data' from internet companies to study individual behavior and market interactions. We suspect that the use of this type of data is likely to become widespread in economics and social science research, and will require new tools and methods. The strategies described include ways of incorporating clickstream and listing data into economic analyses, and dealing effectively with the scale and heterogeneity inherent in large internet markets. The research will yield broader impact by developing new answers to several problems of substantive policy interest. The effects of internet sales tax policy currently are subject to active debate at both the state and federal level. We also examine questions about the degree of competition in retail markets, and the types of frictions in these markets, which are often of interest for competition policy. Finally, we provide a range of evidence on consumer behavior in a marketplace with tens of millions of participants in the United States alone, a setting that has been one of the most active for studying hypotheses about consumer psychology and sophistication. This type of evidence has taken on increased importance with the growing influence of behavioral economics on public policy.