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A seller investigates a buyer before setting prices, balancing the cost of acquiring information against the gain from tailoring the contract to the buyer's private type. The optimal signal is coarse: no matter how rich the type space, the…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
The paper explores a consumer search setting where the sellers have asymmetries. The model is an extension of the popular Stahl Model, which is widely used in the literature. The extension introduces sellers with heterogeneous stores…
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…
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…
We consider the problem of learning the preferences of a heterogeneous population by observing choices from an assortment of products, ads, or other offerings. Our observation model takes a form common in assortment planning applications:…
When customers must visit a seller to learn the valuation of its product, sellers potentially benefit from charging a lower price on the first visit and a higher price when a buyer returns. Armstrong and Zhou (2016) show that such price…
We show that the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling multiple, heterogeneous objects to a buyer with ex ante symmetric and additive values is equivalent to the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling identical…
This paper studies ranking policies in a stylized trial-offer marketplace model, in which a single firm offers products and has consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Consumer trials are influenced by past purchases and the ranking of…
Potential buyers of a product or service, before making their decisions, tend to read reviews written by previous consumers. We consider Bayesian consumers with heterogeneous preferences, who sequentially decide whether to buy an item of…
In online marketplaces, customers have access to hundreds of reviews for a single product. Buyers often use reviews from other customers that share their type -- such as height for clothing, skin type for skincare products, and location for…
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…
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…
Online platforms collect rich information about participants and then share some of this information back with them to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem in two-sided markets: If a…
Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…
Recommendation systems capable of providing diverse sets of results are a focus of increasing importance, with motivations ranging from fairness to novelty and other aspects of optimizing user experience. One form of diversity of recent…
The existing studies on consumer search agree that consumers are worse-off when they do not observe sellers' production marginal cost than when they do. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. Employing a canonical model of simultaneous…
The plethora of comparison shopping agents (CSAs) in today's markets enables buyers to query more than a single CSA when shopping, and an inter-CSAs competition naturally arises. We suggest a new approach, termed "selective price…
This paper examines the effect of ownership concentration on product position, product variety and readership in markets for daily newspapers. US antitrust policy presumes that mergers reduce the amount and diversity of content available to…