Michelle Fang Publications

Following the advent of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2006, the cost of starting a new business substantially decreased, leading venture capital firms to adapt their investment approach. The authors analyze why investors are increasingly adopting the “spray and pray” investment approach in early stages, provide limited governance, and prefer businesses where the future potential is revealed quickly and cheaply. Additionally, they use the technological shock of AWS to explain the rise of new financial intermediaries such as accelerators.

How does price salience, or when fees are listed more clearly upfront, affect the quantity and quality of the product purchased? In this paper, the authors use a dataset from the online ticketing platform StubHub to show the effects of hiding buyer fees until the checkout page on consumer decisions for product choice, total revenue, and possible forces that might influence salience.

Brave is an open-source, privacy-focused browser that blocks third-party ads and is able to load pages twice as fast as Chrome or Firefox. It was founded in 2015 by the creator of Javascript and the Mozilla Project. This summary explains how Brave operates a decentralized digital ad-exchange using its own cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The BAT ecosystem rewards users for viewing ads, funds advertisers, and helps make the user attention market more transparent and efficient.

Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have amassed an unprecedented collection of individual data. The authors demonstrate why data ownership is insufficient to give consumers control over their data and how individual data is actually social data due to data externalities. The paper explores the effects of collecting individual data, terms of trade between consumers and digital platforms, the social dimension of data, and how data intermediaries change the level of aggregation and precision of information they provide. The authors find that the revenue-maximizing data policy is to collect consumer data but not forward it to producers.