Related papers: Uncertain Product Availability in Search Markets
We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…
We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
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…
Two agents trade an item in a simultaneous offer setting, where the exchange takes place if and only if the buyer's bid price weakly exceeds the seller's ask price. Each agent is randomly assigned the buyer or seller role. Both agents are…
We test the predictions of the sticky information model using a survey dataset by comparing shoppers accuracy in recalling the prices of regulated and comparable unregulated products. Because regulated product prices are capped, they are…
Recommender systems often rely on models which are trained to maximize accuracy in predicting user preferences. When the systems are deployed, these models determine the availability of content and information to different users. The gap…
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 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…
In the restructured electricity industry, electricity pooling markets are an oligopoly with strategic producers possessing private information (private production cost function). We focus on pooling markets where aggregate demand 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…
We analyze competition on nonlinear prices in homogeneous goods markets with consumer search. In equilibrium firms offer two-part tariffs consisting of a linear price and lump-sum fee. The equilibrium production is socially efficient as the…
Data is the central commodity of the digital economy. Unlike physical goods, it is non-rival, replicable at near-zero cost, and traded under heterogeneous licensing rules. These properties defy standard supply--demand theory and call for…
Consumers on a shopping mission often leverage both product search and information seeking systems, such as web search engines and Question Answering (QA) systems, in an iterative process to improve their understanding of available products…
We discuss several aspects of creation of adequate mathematical models in other sciences. In particular, many difficulties stem from great complexity of the source systems and the presence of a variety of uncertain factors. We illustrate…
Motivated by the prevalence of prediction problems in the economy, we study markets in which firms sell models to a consumer to help improve their prediction. Firms decide whether to enter, choose models to train on their data, and set…
This study concerns the market for research collaboration between industry and universities. It presents an analysis of the population of all Italian university-industry collaborations that resulted in at least one international scientific…
In the basic recommendation paradigm, the most (predicted) relevant item is recommended to each user. This may result in some items receiving lower exposure than they "should"; to counter this, several algorithmic approaches have been…
We study the effects of introducing information inefficiency in a model for a random linear economy with a representative consumer. This is done by considering statistical, instead of classical, economic general equilibria. Employing two…
Intermediaries, like real estate agents, Consumer Reports, and Zagats, have long helped buyers to identify their most suitable options. Now, the combination of databases and the Internet enables them to serve consumers dramatically more…