Search Platforms: Big Data and Sponsored Positions
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.
Dual Learning: How and How Much Can Platforms Learn from Searching 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.
Unobserved Wholesale Contracts
This paper is now R&R 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.
Influencing Search
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.
Consumer Search and Product Returns in E-Commerce
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.
Dynamic Pricing with Uncertain Capacities
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.