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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…

This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…

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…

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…

This paper explains four things in a unified way. First, how e-commerce can generate price equilibria where physical shops either compete with virtual shops for consumers with Internet access, or alternatively, sell only to consumers with…

A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…

Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures…

We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…

This paper examines competitive information disclosure in search markets with a mix of savvy consumers, who search costlessly, and inexperienced consumers, who face positive search costs. Savvy consumers incentivize truthful disclosure;…

A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…

The sorting and filtering capabilities offered by modern e-commerce platforms significantly impact customers' purchase decisions, as well as the resulting prices set by competing sellers on these platforms. Motivated by this practical…

We develop a probabilistic consumer choice framework based on information asymmetry between consumers and firms. This framework makes it possible to study market competition of several firms by both quality and price of their products. We…

This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their "friends" and less information…

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…

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…

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…

How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…

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…

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…