No abstract

No abstract

As an intermediary improves trust between two sides of its market to facilitate matching and transactions, it faces an increased risk of disintermediation: with sufficient trust, the two sides may circumvent the intermediary to avoid the intermediary's fees. We investigate the relationship between increased trust and disintermediation by leveraging a randomized control trial on a major online freelance marketplace. Our results show that enhanced trust increases the chance for high-quality freelancers to be hired. When the trust level is sufficiently high, however, it also increases disintermediation, which offsets the revenue gains from the increase in the hiring of high-quality freelancers. We also identify heterogeneity across clients and freelancers in their tendencies to disintermediate.

No abstract

Online advertising, also known as web advertising or Internet marketing, is the means and process of promoting products and services on the Internet, and it has been one of the important business models for the Internet. Due to its lucrative nature and its large scale of adoption, it has also been a target for malicious parties with various attack aims such as getting a cut of online advertising revenues, obtaining a user's privacy, and spreading malware. Over the years, a great deal of research has been conducted on online advertising. Recently, the health of the online advertising ecosystem has become more of a concern for both advertisers and regular Internet users. Advertising budgets have been abused, and Internet users' privacy and security have been infringed. In this article, we broadly study threats to online advertising and trace the root causes from a systems point of view. Existing threat mitigation strategies are also reviewed and analyzed. To protect online advertising, which has been an essential funding source of many free Internet services, several challenges still need to be addressed, including the need for transparency of the advertising ecosystem and software vulnerabilities on the client-side. To overcome these challenges, we conclude by brainstorming some innovative ideas on some potentially interesting and useful research directions. CCS Concepts: • Security and privacy → Web application security; Domain-specific security and privacy architectures;