Vlog with Prof. Luis Aguiar (UZH) on "Platforms, Power, and Promotion: Evidence from Spotify Playlists"

Many online markets are dominated by a handful of platforms, raising concerns about the exercise of market power in the digital age. In their paper external page Platforms, Power, and Promotion: Evidence from Spotify Playlists, Professors external page Luis Aguiar (UZH) and external page Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota and NBER) assess the power of Spotify by measuring the impact of its promotion decisions - via platform-operated playlists - on the success of songs and artists. They employ discontinuity and instrumental identification approaches and find large and significant effects of playlist inclusion on success. Their results provide direct evidence of a prominent platform’s power and suggest a need for continued scrutiny of how platforms exercise their power.

In the new episode of CLE's vlog and podcast series, Professor Luis Aguiar discusses the study and its outcome with Professor Stefan Bechtold (ETH).