Related papers: Using Information to Amplify Competition
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…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
A bipartite producer-consumer network is constructed to describe the industrial structure. The edges from consumer to producer represent the choices of the consumer for the final products and the degree of producer can represent its market…
The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
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…
Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…
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 decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
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…
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…
Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing…
A monopolist seller of multiple goods screens a buyer whose type is initially unknown to both but drawn from a commonly known distribution. The buyer privately learns about his type via a signal. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism in…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
As Internet applications have become more diverse in recent years, users having heavy demand for online video services are more willing to pay higher prices for better services than light users that mainly use e-mails and instant messages.…
I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…
I study how to regulate firms' access to consumer data when a regulator faces non-Bayesian uncertainty about how firms will exploit the consumer's information to segment the market and set prices. I fully characterize all worst-case optimal…
Data driven segmentation is the powerhouse behind the success of online advertising. Various underlying challenges for successful segmentation have been studied by the academic community, with one notable exception - consumers incentives…
Can noncooperative behaviour of merchants lead to a market split that prima facie seems anticompetitive? We introduce a model in which service providers, with ISPs being the main example, aim at optimizing the number of customers using…
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…