Related papers: Monopoly, Product Quality, and Flexible Learning
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…
We study dynamic reputation in a social-learning environment where only purchase decisions are observable. A long-lived seller posts a fixed price and chooses costly product quality in each period before interacting with short-lived buyers…
A defining feature of digital goods is that replication and degradation are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, low-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. This paper studies quality-based…
We revisit the classic job-market signaling model of \cite{spence1973job}, introducing profit-seeking schools as intermediaries that design the mapping from candidates' efforts to job-market signals. Each school commits to an attendance fee…
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…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm using a robust-design approach. We solve for the policy that minimizes the regulator's worst-case regret, where the regret is the difference between his complete-information payoff minus his…
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 agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
When learning is used to inform decisions about humans, such as for loans, hiring, or admissions, this can incentivize users to strategically modify their features, at a cost, to obtain positive predictions. The common assumption is that…
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare…
A monopolist wishes to maximize her profits by finding an optimal price policy. After she announces a menu of products and prices, each agent $x$ will choose to buy that product $y(x)$ which maximizes his own utility, if positive. The…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
Potential buyers of a product or service, before making their decisions, tend to read reviews written by previous consumers. We consider Bayesian consumers with heterogeneous preferences, who sequentially decide whether to buy an item of…
A profit-maximizing monopolist curates a database for users seeking to learn a parameter. There are two user types: "Nowcasters" wish to learn the parameter's current value, while "forecasters" target its long-run value. Data storage…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
We advance a recently flourishing line of work at the intersection of learning theory and computational economics by studying the learnability of two classes of mechanisms prominent in economics, namely menus of lotteries and two-part…