Alibaba forms Luohan Academy to promote research in digital economy

I just returned from a lightning visit to Hanzhou, the home of Alibaba, which is founding a research academy to study the digital economy.  It will be very interesting to see what develops.

Here are some news stories, with pictures:

Alibaba Initiates the Open Research Platform "Luohan Academy"

"HANGZHOU, China, June 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alibaba Group Holding Limited ("Alibaba Group") (NYSE: BABA) has advocated the establishment of the "Luohan Academy" ("Academy"), an open research platform with Nobel Laureates and leading international social scientists to address universal challenges faced by societies arising from the rapid development of digital technologies."
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阿里巴巴倡议成立罗汉堂 马云：希望罗汉堂为全世界服务
(G translate: Alibaba proposes to establish Luohantang.Ma Yun: I hope Luohantang will serve the world."

Jack Ma,Tom Sargent, Al Roth, Chris Pissarides.June 26, 2018 Hangzhou

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update: here's the first photo, annotated (from http://hznews.hangzhou.com.cn/chengshi/content/2018-06/27/content_7026385.htm)

Antitrust and competition in an internet economy: conference at the Stigler Center

Here's where I'll be today (unfortunately only for the first day of a two day conference), speaking about promoting/preserving competition in matching markets:

2018 ANTITRUST AND COMPETITION CONFERENCE - DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND CONCENTRATION

APRIL 19–20, 2018
GLEACHER CENTER, 450 N CITYFRONT PLAZA DRIVE

About the Conference

The economic and societal role of the handful of large companies known as “digital platforms" has grown dramatically in the last decade. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are not only transforming communication, media, and retail but have the potential to transform many other industries. While they invest billions in research and development and propel important innovation, they also raise many policy questions with regard to their dominance in many markets, the vast consumer data they collect and own, and their influence on the markets for news, information, and ideas. On April 19 and 20, 2018, the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will dedicate its annual Antitrust and Competition conference to the topic of “Digital Platforms and Concentration.”

Issues to be discussed at the conference include, among others:

• The characteristics and market power of two-sided markets 
• How competition can be promoted in a world of network effects 
• The economics of free products and the challenges they pose to antitrust and existing law 
• The collection, monetization, and ownership of personal data 
• Digital companies’ foray into the physical world
• How and to what degree digital companies are involved in political decision making
• How the startup ecosystem is affected by the presence of big players 

The invitation-only conference will bring together approximately 50 economists, law scholars, intellectuals, venture capitalists, and business people for two days of discussion. The keynote speakers will be Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, Alvin Roth, the 2012 Nobel laureate in economics, and Jean Tirole, the 2014 Nobel laureate in economics.

The conference will be by invitation only. Individuals interested in receiving an invitation, please submit your invitation request here.

Watch Live

The conference will be LIVE-STREAMED. See video link HERE. 

Schedule

Times are listed in Central Time.

Times are listed in Central Time.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

8:00 a.m. – 8:20 a.m.	Breakfast
8:20 a.m. – 8:25 a.m.	Welcome remarks - Guy Rolnik, Conference Organizer, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
8:25 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.	Opening remarks - Daniel Diermeier, Provost, University of Chicago
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	The Rise of Digital Platforms The economic and societal role of digital platforms has grown dramatically in the last decade. Are the large Internet companies really “platforms”? Can they have outsized influence in many market and industries? What explains the size and success of these companies? Are they designing their products to be addictive? What are the most important policy questions that these companies raise? Moderator: Patrick Foulis, New York Bureau Chief, The Economist Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist, American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Tristan Harris, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology Kevin Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Fiona Scott Morton, Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management Chad Syverson, Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Ben Thompson, Author and Founder, Stratechery
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.	Break
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.	Big Data: Economic, Ownership, Legal, and Political Aspects User data is arguably digital platforms’ most valuable asset. How data are used has profound economic, social, and political implications. What are these implications? Where along the value chain do data belong? Could reassigning ownership of the data and making it easily available to users promote competition and address privacy concerns? Moderator: Ludwig Siegele, Technology Editor, The Economist Julia Angwin, Senior Reporter, ProPublica Dennis Carlton, David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management and Dean Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus, Annenberg Innovation Lab, University of Southern California Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance; Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	Break
12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.	Lunch Keynote - Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, US Department of Justice
1:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.	Break
1:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.	The Big Five and Political Power The largest technology companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—are active political players, using the traditional levers of lobbying and financing of research, think tanks, and political campaigns. However, it is their market power, and leverage over media outlets, that opens up new avenues for these platforms and foreign actors that exploit vulnerabilities in their systems to dominate and control the flow of political information among voters. How do they influence political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, and democracy more broadly? Moderator: Matt Stoller, Fellow, Open Markets Insitute Scott Cleland, President, Precursor LLC Ellen Goodman, Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School and Co-director, Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law Barry Lynn, Executive Director, Open Markets Institute Guy Rolnik, Clinical Associate Professor of Strategic Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.	Break
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.	Digital Platforms: Market Power and Market Failures Digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter) rely on network effects to build vast ecosystems of users, advertisers and third-party developers, and to attain substantive market power. How should that market power be measured and what concerns does it raise for competition and entry? What are the market failures left unaddressed by these digital platforms and how should we expect them to govern their respective ecosystems?  Moderator: Jesse Eisinger, Senior Reporter and Editor, ProPublica Jay Pil Choi, University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University Andrei Hagiu, Visiting Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management, MIT Sloan School of Management Sarit Markovich, Clinical Associate Professor of Strategy and Associate Chair of the Strategy Department, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Fiona Scott Morton, Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management Carl Shapiro, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business and Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.	Reception and dinner Dinner Keynote - Alvin Roth, Nobel Laureate and Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University

                                                   

Friday, April 20, 2018

8:00 a.m. – 8:40 a.m.	Breakfast Keynote - Mario Monti, President, Bocconi University; Former Prime Minister of Italy; Former EU Competition Commissioner
8:40 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	Who’s Benefiting? Revisiting the Innovation and Start-Up EcosystemHow does the dominance of the digital platforms impact the startup ecosystem? As big digital players often scoop up startups or replicate startups’ ideas, what constitutes success for emerging startups? How does acquisition versus IPO serve competition and innovation? Is innovation concentrated mainly in the pre-acquisition phase?  Moderator: Adam Lashinsky, Executive Editor, Fortune Elvir Causevic, Managing Director and Co-Head, Tech+IP, Houlihan Lokey  Matt Perault, Director, Public Policy, Facebook Albert Wenger, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures Glen Weyl, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New England and Visiting Senior Research Scholar, Department of Economics and Law School, Yale University
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.	Break
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.	Can Government Resist Corporate Influence? The Big Five have met little government intervention as they have gained dominance and brought about market consolidation. Has government treated digital platforms differently than other corporations? Are digital platforms more politically influential than other big corporations and, if so, why? Moderator: Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist and Associate Editor, Financial Timesand Global Economic Analyst, CNN Alejandra Palacios, Commissioner and Chair, Mexico Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE) Randal Picker, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School Daniel Stevens, Executive Director, Campaign for Accountability, Google Transparency Project Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance; Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	Break
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.	Lunch Keynote - Jean Tirole, Nobel Laureate and Chairman, Toulouse School of Economics
1:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.	Break
1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.	The Amazon Phenomenon Amazon has transformed e-commerce and now begins its foray into the physical world with its acquisition of Whole Foods. The giant e-tailer offers a quintessential case study in how digital platforms are reimagining traditional markets and impacting society at large. Who will be “Amazoned” next? What lessons can we learn from Amazon’s experience with antitrust? As Amazon looks to situate its second headquarters, some believe the bid is a race to the bottom. What is the anticipated net impact of hosting the headquarters on a winner city and state? Moderator: David Dayen, Contributing Writer, The Intercept Joshua Gans, Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto Austan Goolsbee, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Lina Khan, Director, Legal Policy, Open Markets Institute Maurice Stucke, Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law and Of Counsel, The Konkurrenz Group Ben Thompson, Author and Founder, Stratechery
2:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.	Break
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.	US vs EU: Antitrust, Data, and Privacy Policy Questions about digital markets and competition have begun gaining prevalence and commanding more regulatory attention. While the EU has taken aggressive measures against the digital platforms, including a €2.4 billion fine on Google and introducing significant privacy laws (GDPR), regulators in the United States have demonstrated a more lenient approach. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the EU versus US policy choices?  Moderator: John O'Sullivan, Economics Editor, The Economist Ariel Ezrachi, Slaughter and May Professor of Competition Law and Director, Centre for Competition Law and Policy, University of Oxford Justus Haucap, Director, Duesseldorf Institute for Competition Economics, Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf William Kovacic, Global Competition Professor and Director, Competition Law Center, George Washington University Law School Gary Reback, Of Counsel, Carr & Ferrell LLP Thomas Vinje, Partner and Chairman, Global Antitrust Group, Clifford Chance LLP
4:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.	Closing Remarks - Luigi Zingales, Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Safe exchange zones

Marketplaces aren't just tools to bring potential transactors together, they can also seek to make transactions (physically) safe.  Criminals can lurk among Craigslist buyers and sellers, and so there's been a growth of "safe exchange zones".

See e.g. this recent story from New Jersey, where the police department set up a safe exchange zone following a robbery/murder:

Online shoppers urged to use safe exchange zones for transactions

"Passaic Mayor Hector Lora says that his town installed the zones inside and outside of the police station after a series of robberies and scams related to online sales.

“The biggest difference that it makes is that it provides a safe area for individuals to make these transactions and be able to make it back home,” Lora says.

“We have 24 hour surveillance, 24 hour staffing, and it's round the clock,” says Deputy Chief Christopher Storzillo.

"Lora says that he hopes that other towns follow suit and add their own safe exchange zones.

"But until other towns have these zones, officials urge anyone who is buying or selling items online to meet in a public, well-lit place and to call authorities if anything seems suspicious."

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It turns out that safe exchange zones are a thing, here are some databases to help locate one near you:

Safe Deal Zone - Safe Transaction Zone Locator

SafeTrade Stations

Conduct your in-person transactions safely at your local police station.

More Backpage (.com) news

From the Washington Post:
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleads guilty in three states, agrees to testify against other website officials
"Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com whose name was conspicuously absent from an indictment of seven other Backpage officials unsealed Monday, has pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court in Arizona to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. In addition, he agreed to testify against the men who co-founded Backpage with him, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who remained in jail Thursday in Arizona on facilitating prostitution charges.

Backpage, in addition to hosting thinly veiled ads for prostitution since 2004, was accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads on its site and even assisting advertisers in wording their copy so they didn’t overtly declare that sex was for sale, federal investigators allege. In a remarkable three-paragraph admission in his federal plea agreement, Ferrer wrote that “I conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage’s customers.

...

"Ferrer’s sudden capitulation launched a wild seven days for Backpage. A day after Ferrer’s first secret plea, the federal government arrested seven of Ferrer’s former colleagues, including Lacey and Larkin, and shut down Backpage’s websites in the U.S. and around the world. ...

"Then on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law “FOSTA,” the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a bill inspired by the stories of children being prostituted on Backpage..."

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And here's a story from Quartz that follows the work of economists researching the (not all bad) effects of internet marketplaces for prostitution.

The unintended consequences of a crackdown on sites selling sex work

Drug trafficking via the U.S. mail

A recent Senate report (which I haven't seen) has generated a lot of news coverage to the effect that fentanyl, a Schedule II controlled substance (i.e. a drug that may not be legally sold without a prescription in the U.S.) that is implicated in the current opioid crisis in the U.S., is widely available from internet sites that will send it to you in the mail.

Here's the WSJ story:

Stamp Out Easy Mail Access to Deadly Fentanyl, Senate Report Urges


"A U.S. Senate report raises fresh concerns about how easy it is to buy illicit, mail-order opioids from China, a source federal authorities say has fueled a nationwide addiction crisis claiming tens of thousands of lives.

The new Senate report, issued ahead of a hearing Thursday, is the latest to focus on how international mail has become a major conduit for these drugs.

Investigators for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations posed as would-be online buyers, entering terms like “fentanyl for sale” into Google..."

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Try it yourself: https://www.google.com/search?q=fentanyl+for+sale

Internet dating while Muslim

The Guardian has the story:
SingleMuslim.com: how the Yorkshire dating site transformed Muslim romance
It is one of the biggest dating sites in the world and after 17 years, it has has led to over 50,000 marriages.

"The UK site boasts nearly a million UK active users and the company is expanding internationally. (Traffic analysis suggests there are about 1.4m page views per month).Because it is in effect a marriage site rather than a dating site, it also claims a high rate of success. There have been 50,000 SingleMuslim.com weddings, and counting.
...
"When Younis originally set up his website, the problems came from fundamentalists. “Back in the day we used to have death threats,” he says. “All from anonymous keyboard warriors. They would be like ‘it is haram [forbidden] to display photographs of women’. People would have seen their sister on there.”

"Younis was unfazed. Now, he says, he doesn’t hear of anyone who is against what they are doing, mainly because, he believes, “everyone knows someone the site has helped”.
...
"You don’t have to spend very long on SingleMuslim.com to realise it is not Tinder. The options in creating a profile on the site require users to select their level of piety (Very religious/Somewhat religious/Prefer not to say) their sect (Shia/Sunni/Just Muslim) and appearance preferences (Hijab? Beard?).

“What we are not is this kind of swipe right, one-night stand kind of service,” Younis says. “People call it ‘halal dating’ and that’s fine. Halal means being wholesome and right in your faith.”

"About 10% of members join as a family. In those cases, traditionally the mums or the grannies use the site to do the matchmaking, Khan explains. What the company mostly promotes, though, is the opportunity to broaden that search as far as possible. The case studies on the site highlight couples who have crossed national and racial barriers to marry. “We are not SingleShia.com or SinglePakistanimuslim.com,” Younis suggests. There is an empowering impulse in this – and in the insistence that photographs must be full face. “Females who are fully covered don’t get in our galleries,” Khan says. “There is no point in having an image where you just see the eyes.”

AlphaBay dark marketplace shut down, and others spring up

Here's the Telegraph:
AlphaBay: World's largest dark web site is shut down

"The US Government has shut down two of the world's largest markets on the dark web, a hidden corner of the internet often associated with the sale of illegal weapons and drugs.

"The US Department of Justice confirmed on Thursday that it had shuttered the illicit AlphaBay and Hansa websites following a "landmark" investigation involving law enforcement from around the world.

"AlphaBay and Hansa were associated with the trade of illegal goods such as drugs, guns, personal data stolen in hacks, and computer viruses. There were more than 40,000 sellers on AlphaBay who were advertising around 250,000 items of illegal drugs and chemicals, according to Europol.
 ...
"The operation is reminiscent of the 2013 closure of Silk Road, the first popular dark web marketplace, following the arrest of creator Ross Ulbricht. AlphaBay was created in the void left by Silk Road. "
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Here's the Economist:
Two of the biggest dark-web markets have been shut down
History suggests that other sites will soon fill the void

 "But governments’ drug tsars are unlikely to be celebrating for long. Numerous dark-web markets have fallen prey to the police before the latest two. And each time, as shown in a paper* by two cyber-security experts, Nicolas Christin and Kyle Soska, new sites have popped up to fill the void. The authors scraped data from the largest dark-web sites between May 2013 and January 2015 to shed light on this shadowy market. During that period, Silk Road, once the largest market on the dark web, was raided and closed by the FBI. Within months, it was replaced by the less-than-imaginatively named Silk Road 2. In late 2014 this successor site met its demise as well, in another law-enforcement sting called Operation Onymous, at which point Evolution and Agora took up the baton. And after they closed down, customers moved to AlphaBay instead. This most recent pair of closures may end up as another mighty thump in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole."

*Measuring the Longitudinal Evolution of the Online Anonymous Marketplace Ecosystem
Kyle Soska and Nicolas Christin, Carnegie Mellon University
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity15/technical-sessions/presentation/soska
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity15/sec15-paper-soska-updated.pdf
The paper has some interesting remarks on the difficulties to be overcome in surveying dark markets, and lists the following markets that were investigated:

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And here's the BBC, with a story dated August 1:
Dark web markets boom after AlphaBay and Hansa busts
By Leo Kelion

"Trade on several of the dark web's illegal markets has boomed since two major players were shut by the authorities last month, according to research carried out for the BBC.
The US and Dutch authorities forced AlphaBay and Hansa offline to prevent the sale of drugs, weapons and malware.
But over the last week of July, other sites saw their number of listings rise by as much as 28%, the study indicates.
...
" Dream Market is now the biggest illegal store with a total of 98,844 listings at the end of the month. The site was launched in late 2013 and is now one of the oldest dark web markets in existence.
Its number of listings rose by 3,818 over the course of the week.
While that was the biggest increase of the surveyed sites in numerical terms, it represented a relatively modest increase of 3.9%.
"There is some interesting buzz around Dream Market potentially being compromised and/or under law enforcement control, which is feeding fear and uncertainty amongst vendors and buyers," said Mr Ben-Meir.
"That is probably why Dream Market has not grown substantially in the wake of the takedowns."
...
 "The next biggest site is TradeRoute, which rose from 14,914 listings to 17,816 over the period - a 16.3% gain.
It includes forged documents and black market tobacco and alcohol among its wares."
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See earlier posts on the drug market known as Silk Road.
See paper Traveling the Silk Road: A Measurement Analysis of a Large Anonymous Online
Marketplace, by Nicolas Christin

Evolution of the online dating business

The NY Times and Consumer Reports bring us up to date on dating.  And (at the end of this long post) making dating great again in the new political environment..


Here's the NY Times:

For Online Dating Sites, a Bumpy Road to Love

"Not many people have heard of Spark Networks, but far more are familiar with what it owns: JDate, ChristianMingle and a host of other sites like SilverSingles.com and BlackSingles.com.
...
"according to Spark Networks’ 2015 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the number of paid subscribers to its Jewish networks declined to around 65,000 last year from a little over 85,000 in 2012. Its total for all networks dropped by more than 55,000 people, to under 204,000.

This comes at a time when an increasing number of Americans are trying to find partners online. According to the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of Americans have used online dating sites or mobile apps, compared with 11 percent in 2013. Spark Network’s revenues fell nearly 22 percent from 2014 to 2015.

...

"There are about 4,500 online dating companies, according to a report by the market research company IBISWorld, but the majority are tiny. The largest player in the field is the Match Group, with 51 dating sites; over the last few years alone it acquired such high-profile companies as Tinder and Plenty of Fish.

“It’s never been cheaper to start a dating site and never been more expensive to grow one,” said Mark Brooks, a consultant for the internet dating industry who also runs Online Personals Watch. Part of the problem, he said, is that 70 percent of internet dating in the United States is now on mobile.

"Dating apps usually start by offering their services completely free to bring in new users. There are then two ways for the services to make money: advertising and turning free users into paying ones.

“It used to be 10 percent of those who registered converted to paid,” Mr. Brooks said. “Now it’s more like 2 to 3 percent.”

Advertising can be tough to get, said Tom Homer, editor of the website Dating Site Reviews, and on a mobile device it does not pay much because there is less real estate available than on regular websites.

...

"Some also see a move toward ever more niche sites like MouseMingle.com (Disney lovers) and GlutenFreeSingles.com (the name says it all). But, when you slice the pie ever thinner, “you’re also slicing your membership base,” Mr. Homer said."

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And from Consumer Reports: Online Dating: Match Me If You Can
"According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of American adults have used online dating sites (web-based platforms like Match.com) and/or dating apps (location-based smartphone apps like Tinder).

Participation by those 18 to 24 has almost tripled since 2013, and boomer enrollment has doubled. In fact, people over 50 are one of the fastest growing segments. “It’s a product of the growing normalcy of using social media apps,” says Moira Weigel, author of “Labor of Love: The Invention of Online Dating” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016). “Our real-life and online identities are more and more interwoven.”
...
"Our survey included many people who at some point had used a dating website or an app, as well as a subset of 9,600 respondents who used them in the past two years. The more recently active group rated specific sites.

"Our findings tell an almost contradictory story. On the one hand, the numbers indicate that these sites are helping people find mates. A whopping 44 percent of respondents who tried online dating said the experience led to a serious long-term relationship or marriage. That kind of connection rate would shatter Hall of Fame records, at least in baseball.

But the responses from the more active group suggest they’re highly frustrated. They gave online dating sites the lowest satisfaction scores Consumer Reports has ever seen for services rendered—lower even than for tech-support providers, notoriously poor performers in our ratings.
...
"Michael Norton, Ph.D., a professor at the Harvard Business School who studies consumer behavior, thinks so. Online dating is different from shopping for, say, a sweater, he explains: “Once you decide on the sweater you want, you can get it. But with dating, the sweater has to agree, too.”

Another reason for the low satisfaction scores may be that “most dating sites have some misalignment between profit model and user experience because they are financed through subscription fees or advertising,” says Scott Kominers, Ph.D., a junior fellow in economics at Harvard University. In other words, there’s no incentive for them to make the experience speedy. If you find your life partner on your first date, the site doesn’t make much money off you. Our survey found that among respondents who stopped online dating, 20 percent of men and 40 percent of women said they did so because they didn’t like the quality of their matches. Perhaps that’s why, among those who said they had used multiple dating sites, 28 percent had tried four or more.

But our research also found that online dating, however painful and time-consuming, often does produce the intended result if you use it well—and persevere.
...
“You’re generally going to be best off starting your search on the ‘Big 3’: Match.com, OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish,” says Scott Valdez, founder of Virtual Dating Assistants, which helps people write their profiles and then manages their accounts. “Those are among the most popular dating sites in the world, and when you’re fishing, it just makes sense to drop your line in the most crowded ponds.”

That’s generally true unless you have a particular guiding factor, such as religion, race, or politics, in which case you can go to a niche site like JDate or BlackPeopleMeet.
..

 

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Finally, Could you date someone whose politics you couldn't stand? Could your political views get you a date?  Have I got the dating site for you...
https://trumpsingles.com/  making dating great again...

Matchmaking nudges and noodges in the internet age

The internet dating site JSwipe has a program called ParentPay. The website has a banner reading (subtly) "We want grandchildren."

Here's the text of the ad that made its way into my email:

"Hey Mom, Hey Dad,

Hanukkah is here! We have the perfect gift. 

We both know your kid is a catch and anyone would be lucky to date them. It's time to give your son or daughter (friend, cousin, or grandkids) the right tools for finding *Jewish* love in the digital age --- and fast track your way to grandkids.

JSwipe is the #1 Jewish dating app with nearly one million users across the world. We're responsible for hundreds of marriages and want your kids to be next! Really. That's our job.

JSwipe offers a First Class membership that provides premium features to maximize the impact of their dating experience. Better matches = better dates. While their unpaid internship is great for their career, it's not so great for helping them afford a First Class membership.

That's where you come in!

Because you're such incredible parents, we're offering you the opportunity to gift your child one-year of JSwipe First Class for $99, less than half of what it usually costs! Consider it their "love allowance." The perfect Hanukkah gift! The gift of love that keeps on giving.

Would you be happy to have a new guest at your next family holiday? We know Bubbe would. Don't Passover this opportunity! "
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JSwipe has a free mode and a paid mode, and the paid mode gives more signals (superswipes) that can be sent per day, etc.  Here's a review

Reputation in online marketplaces

Two recent NBER papers tell us about trust, quality, and reputation in online marketplaces.

BUYING REPUTATION AS A SIGNAL OF QUALITY:
EVIDENCE FROM AN ONLINE MARKETPLACE
Lingfang (Ivy) Li, Steven Tadelis, Xiaolan Zhou
Working Paper 22584, http://www.nber.org/papers/w22584

ABSTRACT: Reputation is critical to foster trust in online marketplaces, yet leaving feedback is a public good that can be under-provided unless buyers are rewarded for it. Signaling theory implies that only high quality sellers would reward buyers for truthful feedback. We explore this scope for signaling using Taobao's "reward-for-feedback" mechanism and find that items with rewards
generate sales that are nearly 30% higher and are sold by higher quality sellers. The market design implication is that marketplaces can benefit from allowing sellers to use rewards to build reputations and signal their high quality in the process.

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DESIGNING ONLINE MARKETPLACES:

TRUST AND REPUTATION MECHANISMS

Michael Luca

Working Paper 22616, http://www.nber.org/papers/w22616

ABSTRACT: Online marketplaces have proliferated over the past decade, creating new markets where none existed. By reducing transaction costs, online marketplaces facilitate transactions that otherwise would not have occurred and enable easier entry of small sellers. One central challenge faced by designers of online marketplaces is how to build enough trust to facilitate transactions between strangers. This paper provides an economist’s toolkit for designing online marketplaces, focusing on trust and reputation mechanisms.

Has the internet "wrecked" college admissions?

That's what the headline writers at the Washington Monthly think:
How the Internet Wrecked College Admissions: Colleges are drowning in online applications, which is bad news for both schools and students.  by Anne Kim

Here are the opening paragraphs:
"Over the last decade, the internet has made it much easier for students to apply to college, especially thanks to services like the “Common App.” For the nearly 700 schools now part of the Common Application—the nation’s leading standardized online college application portal—students can browse by name, state, or region, by the type of institution (public or private), and by whether it’s co-ed or single-sex. Clicking on a college takes students to a brief profile of the school and then an invitation: “Ready to apply?”

And now that students can apply to more colleges with the click of a few buttons, they are doing exactly that. In 2013, according to the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC), 32 percent of college freshmen applied to seven or more colleges—up 10 percentage points from 2008. Almost all of this growth has been online. In the 2015–16 admissions cycle, over 920,000 students used the Common App, more than double the number in 2008–09."

The App Economy: at SIEPR

I'm looking forward to spending the day tomorrow at SIEPR, learning about how apps are changing the internet and the world. (That's one of the perks of working in Silicon Valley...)

SIEPR Policy Forum, The App Economy, Friday, January 30th, 2015.

Once again the Valley is buzzing with startups, new ventures, and concerns about a bubble.  Our next Forum will look at how the move to mobile and the explosion of entrepreneurial activity is once more driving innovation.

For the App Economy, we want to look at two big questions:

1.  What drives the Mobile and App Economy?   
2.  How is the rise of the App Economy - and mobile technology more generally - changing the rest of the economy?

Agenda

10:00-11:00:  The Mobile App Economy

Simon Khalaf, CEO, Flurry from Yahoo, "The App Economy 2015"

 

Tim Bresnahan, Stanford Economics & SIEPR, Pai-Ling Yin, SIEPR, "How Mobile Platforms Compete"

 

11:00-12:15:  Apps and Data

Erin Coffman, Chetan Sharma, and Alok Gupta:  AirBnB

 "How Mobile and Big Data Change Travel"

Amir Ghodrati, AppAnnie – "App + Data"
 

Steve Tadelis – UC Berkeley Economics, "Consumer Mobile Payments and Finance Big Data"

 

 

1:00-2:15:  The Next 3 Billion Users

Rick Osterloh, CEO, Motorola Mobility,  "Reaching The Next 3 Billion Users"

Ming Zeng, Chief Strategy Officer, Alibaba
Ethan Yeh, Lead Economist, Twitter,  "Apps for the Developing World"
 

 

 

2:15-3:15:  Apps and Profits

Anna Bager,  Senior VP, Internet Advertising Bureau,  "Mobile Ads and Video"

Liran Einav, Stanford Economics,  "Mobile's Impact on Ecommerce at EBay"

 

 

3:15-4:00: Investing in Connected Commerce

Ashwini Chhabra, Uber
Simon Rothman, Partner, Greylock Venture Capital 

 

Reception following conclusion. 


A printable agenda, with biography links, is here.

Registration is available here.    

All current Stanford students are welcome, as well as members of the Stanford community with a Stanford ID.  Others are welcome by invitation.   The event is free   It begins at 10am, Friday January 30th at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford.

Traditional auction houses move online

Competition, like similarity, isn't as symmetric as we think. Where once eBay competed with established auctioneers like Christies and Sotheby's, now they are playing catchup in the market that eBay pioneered.

Carol Vogel in the NY Times has the story: Gone, in an Instant Auction

"Right now it’s possible to click on Christies.com and bid on a Warhol drawing, a Helmut Newton photograph and an ostrich Hermès Birkin bag. Often there is a selection of rare wines to be purchased there, too.

And last year, the auction house introduced a buy-it-now feature echoing eBay that offers a head-spinning variety of watches that can be snapped up instantly. “The main objective here is the acquisition of new clients,” said Steven P. Murphy, Christie’s chief executive. “We’re building our online business the old-fashioned way, brick by brick.”

So far the auction house says it has invested $50 million in hiring experts and building its own infrastructure. It dipped its toes in online-only auctions in 2011 with a sale of Elizabeth Taylor’s clothes and jewelry. That effort ramped up considerably last year when Christie’s held 51 online-only sales. Officials there said that number was increasing by 50 percent this year.

Both Christie’s and its rival Sotheby’s introduced online bidding during their live auctions about four years ago. Their success, coupled with the realization that a new population of online shoppers is waiting to be tapped around the world, is what is driving their focus on online-only sales.

While Christie’s is promoting its homegrown e-commerce business, Sotheby’s is taking a different route. In July it announced a partnership with eBay. In the next few months Sotheby’s plans to broadcast most of its live auctions on a new area of eBay’s website. And over time Sotheby’s and eBay will add more options for shoppers, including online-only sales. Sotheby’s hopes to lure eBay’s nearly 150 million customers into being as comfortable buying a 19th-century dining room table or Damien Hirst print as they are a new suitcase or a pair of sneakers.

“Both auction houses are racing to catch up with luxury retailing that has been a huge success online,” said Josh Baer, an art adviser who publishes the Baerfaxt, an industry newsletter, and who was hired by eBay last year to help shape its art programs. “It is now clear to everyone in the art business that it is no longer if online sales of art can happen, but who executes them best.”