Related papers: Information Asymmetry and Search Intensity
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
We consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…
Consumers value keeping some information about them private from potential marketers. E-commerce dramatically increases the potential for marketers to accumulate otherwise private information about potential customers. Online marketers…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
Platforms design the form of presentation by which sellers are shown to the buyers. This design not only shapes the buyers' experience but also leads to different market equilibria or dynamics. One component in this design is through the…
Many important economic outcomes result from the combined effects of several choices, so the best option is not determined from each choice in isolation, but depends on how each choice alters total outcomes. We formally show that narrow…
An asymmetric information model is introduced for the situation in which there is a small agent who is more susceptible to the flow of information in the market than the general market participant, and who tries to implement strategies…
One of the impediments to the efficiency of information markets is the inherent information asymmetry present in them, exacerbated by the "buyer's inspection paradox" (the buyer cannot mitigate the asymmetry by "inspecting" the information,…
We empirically study the interplay between exploration and competition. Systems that learn from interactions with users often engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal decisions in order to acquire new information for future…
In continuous-choice settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. Thus, firms optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to…
Extremum seeking systems are powerful methods able to steer the input of a (dynamical) cost function towards an optimizer, without any prior knowledge of the cost function. To achieve their objective, they typically combine time-periodic…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
Search frictions can impede the formation of optimal matches between consumer and supplier, or employee and employer, and lead to inefficiencies. This paper revisits the effect of search frictions on the firm size distribution when…
Preferential Bayesian optimization allows optimization of objectives that are either expensive or difficult to measure directly, by relying on a minimal number of comparative evaluations done by a human expert. Generating candidate…
Despite a growing desire among consumers to shop responsibly, translating this intention into behaviour remains challenging. Previous work has identified that information seeking (or lack thereof) is a contributing factor to this…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
In many matching markets, one side "applies" to the other, and these applications are often expensive and time-consuming (e.g. students applying to college). It is tempting to think that making the application process easier should benefit…
We study the associations between everyday economic decision-making quality and people's emotional states. Using high-frequency, highly disaggregated consumer "scanner" data, we show that the cost of poor decision-making is substantial, on…
Suppose that we wish to estimate a user's preference vector $w$ from paired comparisons of the form "does user $w$ prefer item $p$ or item $q$?," where both the user and items are embedded in a low-dimensional Euclidean space with distances…