Related papers: Regulating Oligopolistic Competition
We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm using a robust-design approach. We solve for the policy that minimizes the regulator's worst-case regret, where the regret is the difference between his complete-information payoff minus his…
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
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…
Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
I study how to regulate firms' access to consumer data when a regulator faces non-Bayesian uncertainty about how firms will exploit the consumer's information to segment the market and set prices. I fully characterize all worst-case optimal…
I show that firms price almost competitively and consumers can infer product quality from prices in markets where firms differ in quality and production cost, and learning prices is costly. Bankruptcy risk or regulation links higher quality…
This paper investigates the impacts of competition in autonomous mobility-on-demand systems. By adopting a network-flow based formulation, we first determine the optimal strategies of profit-maximizing platform operators in monopoly and…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
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…
This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces…
In a market system, regulations are designed to prevent or rectify market failures that inhibit fair exchange, such as monopoly or transactions with hidden costs. Because regulations reduce profits to those possessing unfair advantage,…
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…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
We model competition on a credence goods market governed by an imperfect label, signaling high quality, as a rank-order tournament between firms. In this market interaction, asymmetric firms jointly and competitively control the aggregate…
Autonomous vehicles will be an integral part of ride-sharing services in the future. This setting differs from traditional ride-sharing marketplaces because of the absence of the supply side (drivers). However, it has far-reaching…
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…