Related papers: Bring your friend! Real or virtual?

We study the optimal referral strategy of a seller and its relationship with the type of communication channels among consumers. The seller faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social…

A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…

We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…

When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…

We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…

Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…

We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…

We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which a sender wants to persuade a critical mass of receivers by revealing partial information about the state to them. The homogeneous binary-action receivers are located on a communication…

Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing worldwide. We demonstrate the existence of a novel form of market failure in this advertising market: influencer cartels, where groups of influencers collude to increase…

Reciprocity is firmly established as an important mechanism that promotes cooperation. An efficient information exchange is likewise important, especially on structured populations, where interactions between players are limited. Motivated…

A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their "friends" and less information…

We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In…

A sender communicates private information about a hidden state to a receiver who seeks to match his action to that state. The sender strives to appear informed at the receiver's expense. I characterize informative equilibria under a broad…

We consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…

A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…

We study the efficiency of allocations in large markets with a network structure where every seller owns an edge in a graph and every buyer desires a path connecting some nodes. While it is known that stable allocations in such settings can…

This work extends a model of simulating influence in a network of stochastic edge dynamics to account for polarization. The model built upon is termed Dynamic Communicators and seeks to understand the process which produces low volume, high…

Motivated by applications to word-of-mouth advertising, we consider a game-theoretic scenario in which competing advertisers want to target initial adopters in a social network. Each advertiser wishes to maximize the resulting cascade of…

Influence competition finds its significance in many applications, such as marketing, politics and public events like COVID-19. Existing work tends to believe that the stronger influence will always win and dominate nearly the whole…