Economics of Digitization.

• Position: Conferences

An NBER Conference on the "Economics of Digitization" took place in Palo Alto on March 6. NBER Research Associates Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University, Josh Lerner of Harvard University, and Scott Stern of MIT organized the program. These papers were discussed:

* Samuel Fraiberger and Arun Sundararajan, New York University, "Peer-to-Peer Rental Markets in the Sharing Economy"

* Thomas Quan, University of Minnesota, and Kevin Williams, Yale University, "Product Variety, Across-Market Demand Heterogeneity, and the Value of Online Retail"

* Weijia Dai, University of Maryland; Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland and NBER; Jungmin Lee, Sogang University; and Michael Luca, Harvard University, "Optimal Aggregation of Consumer Ratings: An Application to Yelp.com" (NBER Working Paper No. 18567)

* Erik...