ESSAYS ON COMMISSION FEES, INTERMEDIARIES, AND PLATFORM GOVERNANCE: EVIDENCE FROM THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
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This dissertation examines digital economics and platform governance on multi-sided user-generated content (UGC) platforms, a dominant digital infrastructure that connects creators, advertisers, viewers, and third-party intermediaries. Despite the exponential growth of creator economies and platform-mediated advertising, two critical gaps persist in information systems (IS) research: first, the causal impact of platform commission pricing on cross-sided market outcomes remains understudied; second, the strategic behavior of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs)—key delegated intermediaries—and their distortion of platform incentive policies lack empirical and theoretical validation. This dissertation addresses these gaps with empirical studies that utilize natural experiments on large-scale digital platforms, quasi-experimental econometrics, and agent-based simulation. The first study evaluates a policy shock that eliminated commission fees for a sponsored link. Using time-series and cross-sectional difference-in-differences (DiD) models, I show that advertisers exhibit high price sensitivity, reallocating ad placements to fee-exempt links without expanding total spending. This substitution reduces platform commission revenue and generates unintended distributional effects: top creators capture disproportionate gains in engagement and sponsorship orders, exacerbating superstar dynamics in the creator ecosystem. The second study investigates the delegation of traffic incentives by the platform, using triple-difference (DIDID) designs and a calibrated agent-based simulation. MCNs reallocate bonus traffic to large incumbent creators—in addition to the platform’s goal of supporting new creators—driven by motivations for profit-maximizing retention to avoid creator defection. Both policies resulted in redistributive outcomes in the multi-sided ecosystem. Integrated, this dissertation makes three core contributions to IS, platforms, and digital economics: (1) it provides causal evidence that pricing and delegated incentives operate as cross-sided governance mechanisms with heterogeneous effects; (2) it provides an integrated framework to analyze fee and traffic structures and distributional effects on multi-sided digital platforms; and (3) it offers actionable design principles for platforms to balance monetization and ecosystem sustainability. The findings inform platform regulation, intermediary contracting, and digital economy policy in global markets.