Related papers: Attraction Via Prices and Information
When introducing a novel product, a seller sets a price and decides how much information to provide to a buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows the outside option distribution; the seller knows…
One of the impediments to the efficiency of information markets is the inherent information asymmetry present in them, exacerbated by the "buyer's inspection paradox" (the buyer cannot mitigate the asymmetry by "inspecting" the information,…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of…
A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…
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…
We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…
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…
Consumers only discover at the first seller which product best fits their needs, then check its price online, then decide on buying. Switching sellers is costly. Equilibrium prices fall in the switching cost, eventually to the monopoly…
In financial markets valuable information is rarely circulated homogeneously, because of time required for information to spread. However, advances in communication technology means that the 'lifetime' of important information is typically…
This paper studies a decentralized many-to-one matching market where preferences remain uncertain during the matching process. Institutions initiate matching by sending offers, and applicants decide whether to accept upon receiving them.…
Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…
I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information- and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while…
Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
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…