EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Economics of Platform Liability

Yassine Lefouili and Leonardo Madio

No 8919, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Public authorities in many jurisdictions are concerned about the proliferation of illegal content and products on online platforms. One often discussed solution is to make the platform liable for third parties’ misconduct. In this paper, we first identify platform incentives to stop online misconduct in the absence of liability. Then, we provide an economic appraisal of platform liability that highlights the intended and unintended effects of a more stringent liability rule on several key variables such as prices, terms and conditions, business models, and investments. Specifically, we discuss the impact of the liability regime applying to online platforms on competition between them and the incentives of third parties relying on them. Finally, we analyze the potential costs and benefits of measures that have received much attention in recent policy discussions.

Keywords: liabilities rules; online platforms; illegal content and products; intellectual property (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: K13 K40 K42 L22 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-ind, nep-law and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8919_0.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The economics of platform liability (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: The Economics of Platform Liability (2022) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8919

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe (wohlrabe@ifo.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8919