Do Online Dating Platforms Help Those Who Need Them Most?

The $2 billion online dating industry promises the possibility of a priceless product: romantic love. Associate Professor Mikolaj Piskorski investigates whether these sites are helping the lonely—or just making life easier for young singles who are popular already. Open for comment; 17 Comments posted.

Testing Coleman’s Social-Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia

Mikolaj J. Piskorski and Andreea Gorbatai

Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and doctoral candidate Andreea Gorbatai look to the editing process on Wikipedia to test and validate the well-accepted (but little-verified) theory of sociologist James Coleman that social norm violations decline as network density increases. Support for Coleman's mechanism would alert us to the importance of punishments for norm violations and rewards for such punishments, and thus help us to design social systems in which norms are observed. Open for comment; 4 Comments posted.

Platforms and Limits to Network Effects

Hanna Halaburda and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski

Why do platforms that restrict choice and charge higher prices seem to prosper alongside platforms offering cheap or free unlimited choice? In the online dating market, for example, eHarmony deliberately limits the number of candidates available to its customers. Headhunters show only a few candidates to the companies, and even fewer companies to the candidates. In the housing market, brokers limit the number of houses they show to potential buyers and sellers. In this paper, HBS professors Hanna Halaburda and Mikolaj Jan Piskorski challenge conventional understanding of platform competition and network effects by describing a two-sided matching environment and studying the indirect network effects in this environment. They show that the interplay between more choice and more competition influences the strength of network effects and attractiveness of a platform. Some agents may opt for a platform with few choices to avoid higher levels of competition. The researchers' model helps explain why platforms that limit their choice set coexist (and thrive) alongside platforms that offer greater choice. Read More

Understanding Users of Social Networks

Many business leaders are mystified about how to reach potential customers on social networks such as Facebook. Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski provides a fresh look into the interpersonal dynamics of these sites and offers guidance for approaching these tantalizing markets. Read More