Leon Musolff

Leon Musolff is an assistant professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He specializes in empirical industrial organization. His research concentrates on the empirical analysis of e-commerce platforms using tools from structural industrial organization and causal inference techniques from applied microeconomics. He studies how online platforms can design their marketplaces to shape algorithmic competition between merchants, allow for the detection of collusive bidding rings, and tradeoff entry incentives against the need to surface competitively priced products in search and recommendation algorithms. More recent (and early-stage) work explores the impact of generative artificial intelligence and the markets for cloud computing and search engines. Before joining Wharton, Professor Musolff did his graduate work at Princeton University and completed a postdoc in the Economics & Computation group at Microsoft Research New England.

Why Google’s Dominance in Search Persists – And How to Fix It

A new field experiment sheds light on why Google continues to dominate the search engine market despite regulatory interventions and the availability of alternatives. The authors find that while Google offers higher quality, consumer overestimation of this advantage—along with inattention and default effects—helps entrench its market power and limits the effectiveness of proposed antitrust remedies.

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