Related papers: Greater search cost reduces prices

We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn…

We introduce a search problem generalizing the typical setting of Binary Search on the line. Similar to the setting for Binary Search, a target is chosen adversarially on the line, and in response to a query, the algorithm learns whether…

We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…

I examine how upstream mergers affect negotiated prices when suppliers bargain with a monopoly intermediary selling products to final consumers. Conventional wisdom holds that such transactions lower negotiated prices when the products are…

Search frictions can impede the formation of optimal matches between consumer and supplier, or employee and employer, and lead to inefficiencies. This paper revisits the effect of search frictions on the firm size distribution when…

Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…

In this paper, I introduce a profit-maximizing centralized marketplace into a decentralized market with search frictions. Agents choose between the centralized marketplace and the decentralized bilateral trade. I characterize the optimal…

We study the economic interactions among sellers and buyers in online markets. In such markets, buyers have limited information about the product quality, but can observe the sellers' reputations which depend on their past transaction…

A user faces a list returned by a search system, ordered by a noisy proxy for relevance, and decides sequentially whether to pay a fixed cost to inspect another item or stop with the best she has uncovered. She does not enter the page…

This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…

We study information disclosure in competitive markets with adverse selection. Sellers privately observe product quality, with higher quality entailing higher production costs, while buyers trade at the market-clearing price after observing…

A seller investigates a buyer before setting prices, balancing the cost of acquiring information against the gain from tailoring the contract to the buyer's private type. The optimal signal is coarse: no matter how rich the type space, the…

This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…

We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…

We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…

This paper extends the sequential search model of Wolinsky (1986) by allowing firms to choose how much match value information to disclose to visiting consumers. This restores the Diamond paradox (Diamond 1971): there exist no symmetric…

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…

In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…