Related papers: Information Acquisition and Diffusion in Markets

We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…

The spread of disinformation (maliciously spread false information) in online social networks has become an important problem in today's society. Disinformation's spread is facilitated by the fact that individuals often accept false…

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…

An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…

The many decisions people make about what to pay attention to online shape the spread of information in online social networks. Due to the constraints of available time and cognitive resources, the ease of discovery strongly impacts how…

This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…

The optimal price of each firm falls in the search cost of consumers, in the limit to the monopoly price, despite the exit of lower-value consumers in response to costlier search. Exit means that fewer inframarginal consumers remain. The…

An informed planner wishes to spread information among a group of agents in order to induce efficient coordination -- say the adoption of a new technology with positive externalities. The agents are connected via a social network. The…

Most information spreading models consider that all individuals are identical psychologically. They ignore, for instance, the curiosity level of people, which may indicate that they can be influenced to seek for information given their…

This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an…

The partition of society into groups, polarization, and social networks are part of most conversations today. How do they influence price competition? We discuss Bertrand duopoly equilibria with demand subject to network effects. Contrary…

Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…

While there is ample evidence that social and communication networks play a key role during the spread of new ideas, products, or services, network effects are expected to have diminished influence in the stationary state, when all users…

I present evidence that communication between marketplace participants is an important influence on market demand. I find that consumer demand is approximately equally influenced by communication on both formal and informal networks-…

Viral marketing takes advantage of preexisting social networks among customers to achieve large changes in behaviour. Models of influence spread have been studied in a number of domains, including the effect of "word of mouth" in the…

Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…

Can Large Language Models (AI agents) aggregate dispersed private information through trading and reason about the knowledge of others by observing price movements? We conduct a controlled experiment where AI agents trade in a prediction…

How an information spreads throughout a social network is a valuable knowledge sought by many groups such as marketing enterprises and political parties. If they can somehow predict the impact of a given message or manipulate it in order to…

Empirical data of supermarket sales show stylised facts that are similar to stock markets, with a broad (truncated) Levy distribution of weekly sales differences in the baseline sales [R.D. Groot, Physica A 353 (2005) 501]. To investigate…

In a competitive marketing, there are a large number of players which produce the same product. Each firm aims to diffuse its product information widely so that it's product will become popular among potential buyers. The more popular is a…