Platform Economics
An annotated collection of 5 books & papers on platform economics, spanning 2017 to 2026. Featuring works by Brad Stone, D. Acemoglu, B. Falk & Gerry Tsoukalas and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Upstarts
Stone's second major work of tech journalism covers the parallel rise of Uber and Airbnb — the post-2008 generation of platforms that inserted themselves between supply and demand in transportation and hospitality. The b…
When Big Data Enables Behavioral Manipulation
Acemoglu and co-authors build a formal model of something practitioners intuit but rarely see rigorously: platforms do not merely recommend products, they learn which product attributes deceive users most efficiently and…
The AI Layoff Trap
Falk and Tsoukalas construct a task-based competitive model to show that the real problem with AI-driven displacement is not ignorance but a classic collective action failure: each firm rationally automates while the agg…
Beyond Spot Markets: How Thick Sociality in Online Labor Markets is Reshaping Firm Boundaries
The paper's central move is to challenge a foundational assumption in the theory of the firm: that complex, co-specialized work cannot be contracted out. By introducing the concept of 'thick sociality' — the dense relati…
Platforms, Portals, and Private Markets: A Structural Economics of Name, Image, and Likeness
The authors reframe what looks like a labor market reform as something fundamentally different: a platform-mediated private market for intangible assets. This distinction matters because it explains why standard wage-set…