Related papers: Information Asymmetry and Search Intensity

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…

I examine how upstream mergers affect negotiated prices when suppliers bargain with a monopoly intermediary selling products to final consumers. Conventional wisdom holds that such transactions lower negotiated prices when the products are…

We observe nominal price rigidity in tobacco markets across China. The monopolistic seller responds by adjusting product assortments, which remain unobserved by the analyst. We develop and estimate a logit demand model that incorporates…

We study how loyalty behavior of customers and differing costs to produce undifferentiated products by firms can influence market outcomes. In prior works that study such markets, firm costs have generally been assumed negligible or equal,…

Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows firms to better tailor products to consumers' tastes, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about consumers that can be…

Product search serves as an important entry point for online shopping. In contrast to web search, the retrieved results in product search not only need to be relevant but also should satisfy customers' preferences in order to elicit…

We study whether simple algorithmic pricing systems can systematically produce collusive-like prices in multi-firm markets. We consider firms using an explore-then-exploit pipeline: they randomize prices during an initial exploration phase,…

We identify a distinct motive for search, termed catalytic exploration, where agents rationally explore alternatives they expect to reject to resolve uncertainty about the status quo. By decomposing option value into switching and catalytic…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a micro-economic foundation for an argument that the direct employment by the government is more desirable than the government purchase of private goods to eliminate unemployment. A general…

Pricing decisions of companies require an understanding of the causal effect of a price change on the demand. When real-life pricing experiments are infeasible, data-driven decision-making must be based on alternative data sources such as…

We consider situations where consumers are aware that a statistical model determines the price of a product based on their observed behavior. Using a novel experiment varying the context similarity between participant data and a product, we…

Whenever customers' choices (e.g. to buy or not a given good) depend on others choices (cases coined 'positive externalities' or 'bandwagon effect' in the economic literature), the demand may be multiply valued: for a same posted price,…

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

Media publisher platforms often face an effectiveness-nuisance tradeoff: more annoying ads can be more effective for some advertisers because of their ability to attract attention, but after attracting viewers' attention, their nuisance to…

Much like small ripples in a stream, which get lost in the larger waves, small changes in retail prices often fly under the radar of public perceptions, while large price changes appear as marketing moves associated with demand and…

This paper investigates the "Exploitation Business" model, which capitalizes on information asymmetry to exploit vulnerable populations. It focuses on businesses targeting non-experts or fraudsters who capitalize on information asymmetry to…

This paper presents the Sequential Rationality Hypothesis, which argues that consumers are better able to make utility-maximizing decisions when products appear in sequential pairwise comparisons rather than in simultaneous multi-option…

This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…

We develop a nonparametric approach to identify and estimate consumer preferences and unobserved heterogeneity under nonlinear price schedules. Leveraging variation across multiple price schedules, we show that both the utility function and…

Globally operating suppliers face the rising challenge of wholesale pricing under scarce data about retail demand, in contrast to better informed, locally operating retailers. At the same time, as local businesses proliferate, markets…