Related papers: Reputational Bargaining and Inefficient Technology…

When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…

I study a social learning model in which the object to learn is a strategic player's endogenous actions rather than an exogenous state. A patient seller faces a sequence of buyers and decides whether to build a reputation for supplying high…

We study two-sided reputational bargaining with opportunities to issue an ultimatum -- threats to force dispute resolution. Each player is either a justified type, who never concedes and issues an ultimatum whenever an opportunity arrives,…

The dynamics of adoption of innovations is an important subject in many fields and areas, like technological development, industrial processes, social behavior, fashion or marketing. The number of adopters of a new technology generally…

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…

When the full stock of a new product is quickly sold in a few days or weeks, one has the impression that new technologies develop and conquer the market in a very easy way. This may be true for some new technologies, for example the cell…

Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component that enables…

We consider a community of users who must make periodic decisions about whether to interact with one another. We propose a protocol which allows honest users to reliably interact with each other, while limiting the damage done by each…

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…

Online advertising banners are sold in real-time through auctions.Typically, the more banners a user is shown, the smaller the marginalvalue of the next banner for this user is. This fact can be detected bybasic ML models, that can be used…

We study the behavior of for-profit institutions that broadcast reputations to foster trust among market participants. We develop a theoretical model in which buyers and sellers are matched on a platform to engage in transactions involving…

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

We analyze a reputational bargaining game in which a central player negotiates simultaneously with two peripheral players. Each player is either rational or a commitment type who never concedes and insists on a fixed share, and concessions…

Reputation is a powerful mechanism to enforce cooperation among unrelated individuals through indirect reciprocity, but it suffers from disagreement originating from private assessment, noise, and incomplete information. In this work, we…

Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…

In credence goods markets such as health care or repair services, consumers rely on experts with superior information to adequately diagnose and treat them. Experts, however, are constrained in their diagnostic abilities, which hurts market…

Creating incentives for cooperation is a challenge in natural and artificial systems. One potential answer is reputation, whereby agents trade the immediate cost of cooperation for the future benefits of having a good reputation. Game…

When introducing a novel product, a seller sets a price and decides how much information to provide to a buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows the outside option distribution; the seller knows…

Keeping a high reputation, by contributing to common efforts, plays a key role in explaining the evolution of collective cooperation among unrelated agents in a complex society. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily an individual feature, but…

We develop a game-theoretic framework for the study of competition between firms who have budgets to "seed" the initial adoption of their products by consumers located in a social network. The payoffs to the firms are the eventual number of…