Related papers: Information Asymmetry and Search Intensity
A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller's and buyer's values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints…
We introduce pricing formulas for competition and collusion models of two-sided markets with an outside option. For the competition model, we find conditions under which prices and consumer surplus may increase or decrease if the outside…
Advertisements (ads) are an innate part of search engine business models. Advertisers are willing to pay search engines to promote their content to a prominent position in the search result page (SERP). This raises concerns about the search…
Time-varying electricity pricing better reflects the varying cost of electricity compared to flat-rate pricing. Variations between peak and off-peak costs are increasing due to weather variation, renewable intermittency, and increasing…
There is a growing demand for transparency in search engines to understand how search results are curated and to enhance users' trust. Prior research has introduced search result explanations with a focus on how to explain, assuming…
This paper introduces a framework for modeling the cost of information acquisition based on the principle of cost-minimization. We study the reduced-form \emph{indirect cost} of information generated by the sequential minimization of a…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
Consider a customer who needs to fulfill a shopping list, and also a personal shopper who is willing to buy and resell to customers the goods in their shopping lists. It is in the personal shopper's best interest to find (shopping) routes…
In the digital economy, technological innovations make it cheaper to produce high-quality content. For example, generative AI tools reduce costs for creators who develop content to be distributed online, but can also reduce production costs…
Linear Fisher market is one of the most fundamental economic models. The market is traditionally examined on the basis of individual's price-taking behavior. However, this assumption breaks in markets such as online advertising and…
We consider a periodical equilibrium pricing problem for multiple firms over a planning horizon of T periods. At each period, firms set their selling prices and receive stochastic demand from consumers. Firms do not know their underlying…
Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share…
Product search is one of the most popular methods for customers to discover products online. Most existing studies on product search focus on developing effective retrieval models that rank items by their likelihood to be purchased. They,…
The performance of an energy system under a real-time pricing mechanism depends on the consumption behavior of its customers, which involves uncertainties. In this paper, we consider a system operator that charges its customers with a…
We develop a method to estimate producers' productivity beliefs when output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate the market for science. Our model of researchers' labor supply shows how their willingness…
We study the equilibrium behavior in a multi-commodity selfish routing game with many types of uncertain users where each user over- or under-estimates their congestion costs by a multiplicative factor. Surprisingly, we find that…
In this paper, we study the assortment optimization problem faced by many online retailers such as Amazon. We develop a \emph{cascade multinomial logit model}, based on the classic multinomial logit model, to capture the consumers'…
Recently, several researchers have found that cost-based satisficing search with A* often runs into problems. Although some "work arounds" have been proposed to ameliorate the problem, there has not been any concerted effort to pinpoint its…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
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…