Related papers: Greater search cost reduces prices
Existing auto-bidding algorithms in digital advertising often treat the value of an ad opportunity as the revenue obtained when an ad is shown and/or clicked, and bid accordingly. This can lead to wasteful spending because the true value is…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
Sponsored search becomes an easy platform to match potential consumers' intent with merchants' advertising. Advertisers express their willingness to pay for each keyword in terms of bids to the search engine. When a user's query matches the…
This paper studies a spatial competition game between two firms that sell a homogeneous good at some pre-determined fixed price. A population of consumers is spread out over the real line, and the two firms simultaneously choose location in…
This paper studies bargaining when buyers can continue searching for alternative sellers while negotiating, which limits their commitment to complete a transaction. Using transaction level data from a Japanese online marketplace, I document…
Motivated by the emergence of popular service-based two-sided markets where sellers can serve multiple buyers at the same time, we formulate and study the {\em two-sided cost sharing} problem. In two-sided cost sharing, sellers incur…
Low search costs in Internet markets can be used by consumers to find low prices, but can also be used by retailers to monitor competitors' prices. This price monitoring can lead to price matching, resulting in dampened price competition…
Short sales are regarded as negative purchases in textbook asset pricing theory. In reality, however, the symmetry between purchases and short sales is broken by a variety of costs and risks peculiar to the latter. We formulate an optimal…
Consider the following classical search problem: given a target point $p\in \Re$, starting at the origin, find $p$ with minimum cost, where cost is defined as the distance travelled. Let $D$ be the distance of $p$ from the origin. When no…
A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…
In a sponsored search auction, decisions about how to rank ads impose tradeoffs between objectives such as revenue and welfare. In this paper, we examine how these tradeoffs should be made. We begin by arguing that the most natural solution…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
In continuous-choice settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. Thus, firms optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to…
Correctly pricing products or services in an online marketplace presents a challenging problem and one of the critical factors for the success of the business. When users are looking to buy an item they typically search for it. Query…
Pricing decisions of companies require an understanding of the causal effect of a price change on the demand. When real-life pricing experiments are infeasible, data-driven decision-making must be based on alternative data sources such as…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
Do switching costs reduce or intensify price competition in markets where firms charge the same price to old and new consumers? Theoretically, the answer could be either "yes" or "no," due to two opposing incentives in firms' pricing…
We study price regulation for a monopolist operating in networked markets with demand spillovers. Achieving efficiency requires price reductions proportional to consumers' Katz-Bonacich centralities, which generally cannot be implemented by…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
We introduce the profligacy of a search process as a competition between its expected cost and the probability of finding the target. The arbiter of the competition is a parameter $\lambda$ that represents how much a searcher invests into…