Related papers: Limits of Disclosure in Search Markets
We study a model of competitive information design in an oligopoly search market with heterogeneous consumer search costs. A unique class of equilibria -- upper-censorship equilibria -- emerges under intense competition. In equilibrium,…
We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…
Sharing systems have facilitated the redistribution of underused resources by providing convenient online marketplaces for individual sellers and buyers. However, sellers in these systems may not fully disclose the information of their…
In many markets buyers are poorly informed about which firms sell the product (product availability) and prices, and therefore have to spend time to obtain this information. In contrast, sellers typically have a better idea about which…
Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…
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…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
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…
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…
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…
We study the ramifications of increased commitment power for information provision in an oligopolistic market with search frictions. Although prices are posted and, therefore, guide search, if firms cannot commit to information provision…
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…
The optimal price of each firm falls in the search cost of consumers, in the limit to the monopoly price, despite the exit of lower-value consumers in response to costlier search. Exit means that fewer inframarginal consumers remain. 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…
Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…