Related papers: Competition for being visited first and ordered se…

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…

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…

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…

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…

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…

Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…

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…

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…

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…

This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…

A consumer who wants to consume a good in a particular period may nevertheless attempt to buy it earlier if he is concerned that in delaying he would find the good already sold. This paper considers a model in which the good may be offered…

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…

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…

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…

When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in…

We study the economic interactions among sellers and buyers in online markets. In such markets, buyers have limited information about the product quality, but can observe the sellers' reputations which depend on their past transaction…

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…

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…

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…

We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…