Dark web: the economics of online drugs markets

V Bhaskar, Robin Linacre and Stephen Machin

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: The online market for buying and selling drugs is resilient and seems to bounce back rapidly after the exit of a large platform like Silk Road. That is one of the findings of research by Stephen Machin and colleagues, who have collected and analysed information on around 1.5 million drugs transactions on the so-called 'dark web' to understand the economic functioning of these markets. The researchers also find that only a small minority of online drugs deals receive bad ratings from buyers; and sellers that do receive bad ratings typically experience significant sales reductions. The study concludes that in the 'war on drugs', law enforcement needs more resources and better means to tackle drug buying and selling in the cyber domain.

Keywords: dark web; drugs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-law, nep-mkt and nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp514.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cep:cepcnp:514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().