Related papers: Attraction Via Prices and Information

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 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…

We consider portfolio selection under nonparametric $\alpha$-maxmin ambiguity in the neighbourhood of a reference distribution. We show strict concavity of the portfolio problem under ambiguity aversion. Implied demand functions are…

We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…

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…

We study the role of costly information in non-cooperative two-player games when an extrinsic third party information broker is introduced asymmetrically, allowing one player to obtain information about the other player's action. This…

We study information disclosure in competitive markets with adverse selection. Sellers privately observe product quality, with higher quality entailing higher production costs, while buyers trade at the market-clearing price after observing…

Information frictions can harm the welfare of participants in two-sided matching markets. Consider a centralized admission, where colleges cannot observe students' preparedness for success in a particular major or degree program. Colleges…

We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique…

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…

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…

As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…

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…

Connections appear to be helpful in many contexts, such as obtaining a job, a promotion, a grant, a loan, or publishing a paper. This may be due either to favoritism or to information conveyed by connections. Attempts at identifying both…

We consider a platform facilitating trade between sellers and buyers with the objective of maximizing consumer surplus. Even though in many such marketplaces prices are set by revenue-maximizing sellers, platforms can influence prices…

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by…

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…

We consider the problem of how to regulate an oligopoly when firms have private information about their costs. In the environment, consumers make discrete choices over goods, and minimal structure is placed on the manner in which firms…

We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…