Related papers: Monopoly, Product Quality, and Flexible Learning
We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…
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…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
I study multidimensional sequential screening. A monopolist contracts with a buyer who privately observes information about the distribution of their eventual valuations for multiple goods. After initial private information is reported and…
A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…
This paper examines whether one can learn to play an optimal action while only knowing part of true specification of the environment. We choose the optimal pricing problem as our laboratory, where the monopolist is endowed with an…
Consumers only discover at the first seller which product best fits their needs, then check its price online, then decide on buying. Switching sellers is costly. Equilibrium prices fall in the switching cost, eventually to the monopoly…
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
A monopolist wants to sell one item per period to a consumer with evolving and persistent private information. The seller sets a price each period depending on the history so far, but cannot commit to future prices. We show that, regardless…
We study dynamic pricing where a seller repeatedly interacts with a strategic, non-myopic buyer who has a fixed private valuation and discounts future utility. Prior work focused exclusively on posted-price mechanisms, which only extract…
We study how delegating pricing to large language models (LLMs) can facilitate collusion in a duopoly when both sellers rely on the same pre-trained model. The LLM is characterized by (i) a propensity parameter capturing its internal bias…
We study the problem of learning the optimal item pricing for a unit-demand buyer with independent item values, and the learner has query access to the buyer's value distributions. We consider two common query models in the literature: the…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
This paper studies a durable goods monopoly with multiple provision levels, free disposability, and zero marginal cost. We establish a Folk-Theorem-type result: as parties become sufficiently patient, equilibrium seller payoffs contains an…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…
In the context of nonlinear prices, the empirical evidence suggests that the consumers have cognitive biases represented in a limited understanding of nonlinear price structures, and they respond to some alternative perceptions of the…