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Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-21 Toomas Hinnosaar , Keiichi Kawai

Online stores can present a different price to each customer. Such algorithmic personalised pricing can lead to advanced forms of price discrimination based on the characteristics and behaviour of individual consumers. We conducted two…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Joost Poort , Frederik J. Zuiderveen Borgesius

We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-08-29 Avrim Blum , Yishay Mansour , Jamie Morgenstern

This paper considers behavior-based price discrimination in the repeated sale of a non-durable good to a single long-lived buyer, by a seller without commitment power. We assume that there is a mixed population of forward-looking…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Rishi Patel , Emmanouil Pountourakis , Samuel Taggart

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-10-01 Atabek Atayev

We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-10-16 David Kempe , Brendan Lucier

A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-03-03 Shota Ichihashi , Alex Smolin

Low search costs in Internet markets can be used by consumers to find low prices, but can also be used by retailers to monitor competitors' prices. This price monitoring can lead to price matching, resulting in dampened price competition…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Karen Clay , Michael Smith , Eric Wolff

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,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-23 Dongjin Hwang , Ilwoo Hwang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Brendan Lucier , Nicole Immorlica , Markus Mobius , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Daniel G. Goldstein , Jake M. Hofman , Sonia Jaffe , David M. Rothschild

When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-26 Rafael P. Greminger

Suppose customers need to choose when to arrive to a congested queue with some desired service at the end, provided by a single server that operates only during a certain time interval. We study a model where the customers incur not only…

Probability · Mathematics 2014-06-18 Liron Ravner

We study competitive dynamic pricing among multiple sellers, motivated by the rise of large-scale experimentation and algorithmic pricing in retail and online marketplaces. Sellers repeatedly set prices using simple learning rules and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Bar Light , Wenyu Wang

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-09 Kiho Yoon

We consider a periodical equilibrium pricing problem for multiple firms over a planning horizon of T periods. At each period, firms set their selling prices and receive stochastic demand from consumers. Firms do not know their underlying…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yongge Yang , Yu-Ching Lee , Po-An Chen

The notion that economies should normally be in equilibrium is by now well-established; equally well-established is that economies are almost never precisely in equilibrium. Using a very general formulation, we show that under dynamics that…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2012-02-28 Eric Kemp-Benedict

In markets with budget-constrained buyers, competitive equilibria need not be efficient in the utilitarian sense, or maximise the seller's revenue. We consider a setting with multiple divisible goods. Competitive equilibrium outcomes, and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-04-09 Simon Finster , Paul W. Goldberg , Edwin Lock

Our society can benefit immensely from algorithmic decision-making and similar types of artificial intelligence. But algorithmic decision-making can also have discriminatory effects. This paper examines that problem, using online price…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius

As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Qinqi Lin , Lingjie Duan , Jianwei Huang

We analyze a two-period, two-market chain-store game in which an incumbent's conduct in one market is only sometimes seen in the other. This partial observability generates reputational spillovers across markets. We characterize equilibrium…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-28 Rubik Khachatryan , Georgy Lukyanov