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• Article | Harvard Business Review | October 14, 2019

  Designing Better Online Review Systems

  Geoff Donaker, Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

  Online reviews are transforming the way consumers choose products and services of all sorts. We turn to TripAdvisor to plan a vacation, Zocdoc to find a doctor, and Yelp to choose a new restaurant. Reviews can create value for buyers and sellers alike, but only if they attain a critical level of quantity and quality. The authors describe principles for setting the incentives, design choices, and rules that help review platforms thrive. To address a shortage of reviews, companies can seed them by hiring reviewers or drawing reviews from other platforms; offer incentives; or pool products. To address selection bias, they can require reviews, allow private comments, and design prompts carefully. To combat fraudulent and strategic reviews, they can set rules for reviewers and call in moderators—whether employees, the community, or algorithms.

  Keywords: reviews; Web Sites; Design; Quality; Reputation;

  Citation:

  Donaker, Geoff, Hyunjin Kim, and Michael Luca. "Designing Better Online Review Systems." Harvard Business Review 97, no. 6 (November–December 2019): 122–129.  View Details

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• Article | Harvard Journal on Legislation | Winter 2019

  From the Digital to the Physical: Federal Limitations on Regulating Online Marketplaces

  Online marketplaces have transformed how we shop, travel, and interact with the world. Yet, their unique innovations also present a panoply of challenges for communities and states. Surprisingly, federal laws are chief among those challenges despite the fact that online marketplaces facilitate transactions traditionally regulated at the local level. In this article, we survey the federal laws that frame the situation, especially §230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), a 1996 law largely meant to protect online platforms from defamation lawsuits. The CDA has been stretched beyond recognition to prevent all manner of prudent regulation. We offer specific suggestions to correct this misinterpretation to assure that state and local governments can appropriately respond to the digital activities that impact physical realities.

  Keywords: marketplaces; peer to peer; sharing economy; decentralized; regulation; preemption; Markets; Internet; Government Legislation; Laws and Statutes; United States;

  Citation:

  Edelman, Benjamin, and Abbey Stemler. "From the Digital to the Physical: Federal Limitations on Regulating Online Marketplaces." Harvard Journal on Legislation 56, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 141–197.  View Details

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• Article | Management Science

  Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence

  Hyunjin Kim and Michael Luca

  Dominant platform businesses often develop products in adjacent markets to complement their core business. One common approach used to gain traction in these adjacent markets has been to pursue a tying strategy. For example, Microsoft pre-installed Internet Explorer into Windows, and Apple set Apple Maps as the iOS default. Policymakers have raised concerns that dominant platforms may be leveraging their market power to gain traction for lower quality products when they use a tying strategy. In this paper, we empirically explore this question by examining Google’s decision to tie its new reviews product to its search engine. We experimentally vary the reviews displayed above Google’s organic search results to show either exclusively Google reviews (Google’s current tying strategy) or reviews from multiple platforms determined to be the best-performing by Google’s own organic search algorithm. We find that users prefer the version that does not exclude competitor reviews. Furthermore, looking at observational data on user traffic to Yelp from search engines, we find that Google’s exclusion of downstream competitors may have been effective. The share of Yelp’s traffic coming from Google has declined over this period, relative to traffic from Bing and Yahoo (which do not exclude other companies’ reviews), and Google reviews has grown quicker than Yelp and TripAdvisor during the period in which they excluded these (and other) reviews providers. Overall, these results shed light on platform strategy: tying has the potential to facilitate entry in complementary markets, even when the tied product is of worse quality than competitors.

  Keywords: tying; platform strategy; google; Product; Quality; Market Platforms; Strategy; Market Entry and Exit;

  Citation:

  Kim, Hyunjin, and Michael Luca. "Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence." Management Science 65, no. 2 (February 2019): 596–603.  View Details

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