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New Digital Business Models

What new business models are made possible by digitization? How can entrepreneurs more quickly implement these models in ways that create widespread benefits for all?

The IDE works to define the basic principles and systems to help companies design successful platform strategies and facilitate the digital transformation of work and commerce. Our team of researchers examine how networked platforms— like the ones used by Uber, Airbnb, and eBay—are changing the way companies do business. Our research is redesigning the playbook for developing a successful platform strategy and focuses on how companies can maintain a competitive advantage in the digital age, even when they are not the platform provider.

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The long-awaited book, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You, hit bookstores in March. IDE researchers Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey Parker, along with Sangeet Paul Choudary, penned this practical guide to the new economy that is transforming the way we live, work, and play.

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Featured Research Project

Trademarks & the Internet

During the past two decades, the rise of the internet has undoubtedly caused a spike in trademark registrations. With the help of Thomson Reuters, we set out to examine the demand of trademarks and trademarking activities in the digital economy. Our research uses statistical methods to determine how the internet has influenced the quantity of registered trademarks, as well as the number of firms searching for information about prior trademark registration.
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Latest Publications

Active Research Projects Internet Behavior Experiment

Sep 2026

Alessandro Acquisti | T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and Professor of Information Technology, MIT Sloan

Cristobal Cheyre, Cornell University

Li JiangGeorge, Washington University

Florian Schaub, University of Michigan

Cristiana Firullo, Cornell University

Yucheng Li, Carnegie Mellon University

Nancy Xing, Carnegie Mellon University

This a collaborative project will explore in a privacy-preserving, ethical way, how people use the internet and to better understand behaviors online.

Working Papers Evaluating for the Long Term: Learnings from Industry

Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Madhav Kumar | Assistant Professor, Harvard Business School

Leif Sigerson (Pinterest), Tom Cunningham (METR), Winston Chou (Netflix), Sana Pandey (MIT CSAIL), Jonathan Stray (UC Berkeley CHAI), Lo-Hua Yuan (Airbnb ), Eytan Bakshy (Meta), Timothy Chan (Statsig), Molly Davies (Pinterest), Maria Dimakopoulou (Uber), Simon Ejdemyr (Netflix), Kenneth Hung (Meta), Nathan Kallus (Netflix & Cornell University), Thu Le (Lyft), A. Demetri Pananos (Datadog), Lee Richardson (Google), Brennan Schaffner (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Rose Tan, Martin Tingley, Nadia Tomova (Booking.com), Panagiotis Toulis (University of Chicago Booth School of Business), Wenjing Zheng (Roblox), Zander Arnao (Knight-Georgetown Institute), Dean Eckles (MIT)

This paper collects and shares industry knowledge on how to make decisions from short-term experiments that are better aligned with long-term outcomes. Based on a daylong workshop with 26 experts from 15 online platforms and 4 universities, it formulates a series of propositions that reflect current industry knowledge.

Research Papers Long Ties Map

Dean Eckles | Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

This map details the correlation between evidence of economic well-being and a greater number of long ties — people whom you know but with whom you share no other mutual connections.