Related papers: Competition for being visited first and ordered se…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
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…
We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…
When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…
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…
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…
This paper studies a search problem where a consumer is initially aware of only a few products. At every point in time, the consumer then decides between searching among alternatives he is already aware of and discovering more products. I…
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…
Consider a multi-class preemptive-resume $M/D/1$ queueing system that supports advance reservations (AR). In this system, strategic customers must decide whether to reserve a server in advance (thereby gaining higher priority) or avoid AR.…
Price discrimination, which refers to the strategy of setting different prices for different customer groups, has been widely used in online retailing. Although it helps boost the collected revenue for online retailers, it might create…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
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…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
We consider a setting in which bidders participate in multiple auctions run by different sellers, and optimize their bids for the \emph{aggregate} auction. We analyze this setting by formulating a game between sellers, where a seller's…
A seller is pricing identical copies of a good to a stream of unit-demand buyers. Each buyer has a value on the good as his private information. The seller only knows the empirical value distribution of the buyer population and chooses the…
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…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
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…