Related papers: Information Asymmetry and Search Intensity
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…
Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…
Opinionated users often seek information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs while dismissing contradictory evidence due to confirmation bias. This conduct hinders their ability to consider alternative stances when searching the web.…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
In consumer search, there is a set of items. An agent has a prior over her value for each item and can pay a cost to learn the instantiation of her value. After exploring a subset of items, the agent chooses one and obtains a payoff equal…
Fashion preference is a fuzzy concept that depends on customer taste, prevailing norms in fashion product/style, henceforth used interchangeably, and a customer's perception of utility or fashionability, yet fashion e-retail relies on…
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…
The increasing prominence of Socially Responsible Consumers has brought about a heightened focus on the ethical, environmental, social, and ideological dimensions influencing product purchasing decisions. Despite this emphasis, studies have…
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…
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
This paper extends the sequential search model of Wolinsky (1986) by allowing firms to choose how much match value information to disclose to visiting consumers. This restores the Diamond paradox (Diamond 1971): there exist no symmetric…
I characterize the consumer-optimal market segmentation in competitive markets where multiple firms selling differentiated products to consumers with unit demand. This segmentation is public---in that each firm observes the same market…
Recommender systems have become an integral part of online platforms, providing personalized recommendations for purchases, content consumption, and interpersonal connections. These systems consist of two sides: the producer side comprises…
The "free trial" followed by automatic renewal is a dominant business model in the digital economy. Standard models explain trials as a mechanism for consumers to learn their valuation for a product. We propose a complementary theory based…
We study economies where consumers interact independently with many monopolists. When consumer valuations over goods are correlated, correlation can distort the induced distribution of consumer surplus (information rents). We identify which…
We study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing…
We explore heterogeneous prices as a source of heterogeneous or stochastic demand. Heterogeneous prices could arise either because there is actual price variation among consumers or because consumers (mis)perceive prices differently. Our…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
We develop a model of content filtering as a game between the filter and the content consumer, where the latter incurs information costs for examining the content. Motivating examples include censoring misinformation, spam/phish filtering,…
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…