Related papers: Screening in digital monopolies
How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…
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…
A seller investigates a buyer before setting prices, balancing the cost of acquiring information against the gain from tailoring the contract to the buyer's private type. The optimal signal is coarse: no matter how rich the type space, the…
We study the problem of online resource allocation, where multiple customers arrive sequentially and the seller must irrevocably allocate resources to each incoming customer while also facing a procurement cost for the total allocation.…
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…
Business models involving buyers of digital goods in the distribution process are called superdistribution schemes. We review the state-of-the art of research and application of superdistribution and propose systematic approach to market…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
This paper examines an adverse selection environment where a sender with private information (high or low ability) tries to convince a receiver of having higher ability. Without commitment or costly signaling, market failure can occur.…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
This paper examines the effect of ownership concentration on product position, product variety and readership in markets for daily newspapers. US antitrust policy presumes that mergers reduce the amount and diversity of content available to…
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…
In the digital economy, technological innovations make it cheaper to produce high-quality content. For example, generative AI tools reduce costs for creators who develop content to be distributed online, but can also reduce production costs…
In this paper, we study a strategic model of marketing and product consumption in social networks. We consider two firms in a market competing to maximize the consumption of their products. Firms have a limited budget which can be either…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…
In this work, we study a scenario where a publisher seeks to maximize its total revenue across two sales channels: guaranteed contracts that promise to deliver a certain number of impressions to the advertisers, and spot demands through an…
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In…
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 study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing…
This paper studies Markov perfect equilibria in a repeated duopoly model where sellers choose algorithms. An algorithm is a mapping from the competitor's price to own price. Once set, algorithms respond quickly. Customers arrive randomly…
We study a competitive online optimization problem with multiple inventories. In the problem, an online decision maker seeks to optimize the allocation of multiple capacity-limited inventories over a slotted horizon, while the allocation…