Welcome to the website of
Maarten Janssen, Professor of
Microeconomics at the
University of Vienna
Welcome to the website of Maarten Janssen, Professor of Microeconomics at the University of Vienna
I am a fellow of the CEPR (London), a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, a research associate at ZEW (Mannheim) and an academic affiliate at CEG Europe.
My research focusses on consumer search, auctions and markets with asymmetric information. Below you can read about recent developments regarding my research and under “research” you can read older articles. Please click for other information on the relevant links.
LATEST WORK
What’s new?
In this paper we show that asymmetric information arises endogenously when a buyer and seller can acquire information when bargaining about trading a good of a quality that is initially unknown to both of them. We also show that despite this emergence of asymmetric information efficient equilibria exist.
This paper shows that policies that e-commerce retailers adopt strategies to induce consumers to order multiple
products at once and then decide which products to return may actually lead to fewer products being returned.
This paper is now R&R at The Economic Journal. The paper studies a search platform’s incentives to rank firms’ products across sponsored and organic positions, accounting for the incentives of both firms and consumers.
This paper studies the interaction between consumers and platforms. Consumers search for a product they like and the platform observes which products consumers inspect and buy. The platform can influence the search behavior via their ranking algorithms. To learn which products consumers like, we show that the platform first experiments with rankings and later only ranks products that early consumers bought.
This paper has now been accepted for publication at Journal of Industrial Economics. The paper shows that by selling through a retailer a manufacturer with private information about product quality may earn higher expected profit and consumers may earn more consumer surplus if they keep their wholesale pricing contract secret to consumers.
The paper shows that in search markets an influencer who recommends a product to her followers improves consumer surplus and total welfare despite the firm paying for her recommendation.
The paper is now published at Rand Journal of Economics.
This paper studies competitive markets where consumers have to inspect products to see whether they like them. It shows how firms strategically choose their product return strategy to induce consumers to buy their product before inspecting it. It asks whether from an efficiency point of view the market creates too many or too few products returns.
We analyze markets, such as those for airline tickets and hotel accommodations, where firms sell time-dated products and have private information about unsold capacities. We show that firms have less market power as under complete information.
In this paper we show that asymmetric information arises endogenously when a buyer and seller can acquire information when bargaining about trading a good of a quality that is initially unknown to both of them. We also show that despite this emergence of asymmetric information efficient equilibria exist.
This paper shows that policies that e-commerce retailers adopt strategies to induce consumers to order multiple
products at once and then decide which products to return may actually lead to fewer products being returned.
This paper is now R&R at The Economic Journal. The paper studies a search platform’s incentives to rank firms’ products across sponsored and organic positions, accounting for the incentives of both firms and consumers.
This paper studies the interaction between consumers and platforms. Consumers search for a product they like and the platform observes which products consumers inspect and buy. The platform can influence the search behavior via their ranking algorithms. To learn which products consumers like, we show that the platform first experiments with rankings and later only ranks products that early consumers bought.
This paper has now been accepted for publication at Journal of Industrial Economics. The paper shows that by selling through a retailer a manufacturer with private information about product quality may earn higher expected profit and consumers may earn more consumer surplus if they keep their wholesale pricing contract secret to consumers.
The paper shows that in search markets an influencer who recommends a product to her followers improves consumer surplus and total welfare despite the firm paying for her recommendation.
The paper is now published at Rand Journal of Economics.
This paper studies competitive markets where consumers have to inspect products to see whether they like them. It shows how firms strategically choose their product return strategy to induce consumers to buy their product before inspecting it. It asks whether from an efficiency point of view the market creates too many or too few products returns.
We analyze markets, such as those for airline tickets and hotel accommodations, where firms sell time-dated products and have private information about unsold capacities. We show that firms have less market power as under complete information.