Hybrid Digital Platforms: The Case of BlaBlaCar and BlaBlaBus

Hybrid digital platforms host third-party sellers while offering their own products, raising concerns about potential self-preferential practices. This paper studies key strategic choices of BlaBlaCar, a car-sharing platform that integrated its own bus service, BlaBlaBus. I compare routes with BlaBlaBus to routes of similar travel distance that connect cities with similar populations and share the same origin or destination, without BlaBlaBus. I document three main findings. BlaBlaBus is present in time slots with lower car-sharing supply, consistent with a complementary strategy rather than direct competition. The platform’s price recommendation is the primary determinant of car-sharing prices, indicating the platform exerts significant influence over car sharing prices. However, there is no evidence that these recommendations are used to favor BlaBlaBus. Higher BlaBlaBus prices are associated with lower car-sharing activity, consistent with strategic price competition. Overall, the findings do not support systematic self-preferential behavior and suggest that BlaBlaBus may complement car-sharing rather than harm competition. 

Responsiveness to Gasoline Price Changes in Car-Sharing: Evidence from a Gasoline Price Shock in Italy 

This paper investigates how users of a car-sharing platform respond in the short run to changes in gasoline prices. Using data from the world’s leading car-sharing platform, BlaBlaCar, I analyze the changes in car-sharing offers in response to an exogenous gasoline price shock that raised gasoline prices by an average of 17%. In the days following the gasoline price increase, I find a significantly negative effect on total car-sharing supply, mostly driven by changes in the supply of relatively short trips. The implied negative elasticity is -0.94. However, the evidence also suggests that the gasoline price increase is associated with an increase in the number of new drivers on the platform, possibly to offset the increased cost of driving. Despite the significant increase in the cost of driving and the decrease in car-sharing supply, there is no short-run effect on car-sharing prices after accounting for changes in the pool of drivers. This result is likely explained by the rigidity induced by BlaBlaCar’s price recommendation algorithm, which strongly influences user pricing decisions and does not adjust in response to changes in gasoline prices. 

Criminalizing the Purchase of Sex: International Spillovers in Sex Tourism

We investigate the impact of asymmetric criminalization of prostitution on sex tourism by studying legal changes in Norway, Ireland, France, and Canada, which adopted the "Nordic model" criminalizing only the purchase of sex. Employing a difference-in-differences approach with Google Trends and tourism data, we assess how these reforms influenced tourism flows to neighboring countries and popular sex tourism destinations. We find some evidence of spillover effects: travel to sex-tourism destinations increased from countries adopting the reform, while inflows from countries with milder punishments declined. The effect on search behavior nuances these findings. 

Firms’ Legality and Efficiency: Evidence from Public Procurement 

Do firms with higher legality standards contribute to better procurement outcomes? We address this question in the context of Italian public works procurement, by combining contract-level data on procurement and firm-level data on legality scores, using the Legality Rating System managed by the Italian Antitrust Authority. We find that higher legality scores are positively associated with a significant and economically important improvement in procurement efficiency, measured by shorter time delays and lower extra costs.