Related papers: Monopoly, Product Quality, and Flexible Learning

Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…

We study a setting in which a data buyer seeks to estimate an unknown parameter by purchasing samples from one of K data sellers. Each seller has privately known data quality (e.g., high vs. low variance) and a private per-sample cost. We…

Pricing decisions are often made when market information is still poor. In turn, existing theoretical models often reason about the response of optimal prices to changing market characteristics without exploiting all available information…

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…

We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…

This paper studies Markov perfect equilibria in a repeated duopoly model where sellers choose algorithms. An algorithm is a mapping from the competitor's price to own price. Once set, algorithms respond quickly. Customers arrive randomly…

This paper studies a monopolist selling multiple goods to a consumer with one-dimensional private types. I provide a sufficient condition under which the monopolist's problem is equivalent to finding the upper envelope of the marginal…

We show that the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling multiple, heterogeneous objects to a buyer with ex ante symmetric and additive values is equivalent to the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling identical…

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…

In the Learning to Price setting, a seller posts prices over time with the goal of maximizing revenue while learning the buyer's valuation. This problem is very well understood when values are stationary (fixed or iid). Here we study the…

We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…

How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…

We study the following problem that is motivated by Blockchains where ``miners'' are serially given the monopoly for assembling transactions into the next block. Our model has a single good that is sold repeatedly every day where new demand…

This paper presents a comprehensive analytical study of two competitive cognitive operators' spectrum leasing and pricing strategies, taking into account operators' heterogeneity in leasing costs and users' heterogeneity in transmission…

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…

We characterize optimal mechanisms for the multiple-good monopoly problem and provide a framework to find them. We show that a mechanism is optimal if and only if a measure $\mu$ derived from the buyer's type distribution satisfies certain…

We study the robust sequential screening problem of a monopolist seller of multiple cloud computing services facing a buyer who has private information about his demand distribution for these services. At the time of contracting, the buyer…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

Competition is a main tenet of economics, and the reason is that a perfectly competitive equilibrium is Pareto-efficient in the absence of externalities and public goods. Whether a product is selected in a market crucially relates to its…

We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…