The market values of online platforms, such as Yahoo, stem from their ability to monetize the clicks they generate for firms advertising on their sites. We exploit a unique dataset on clicks from one of Yahoo's price comparison sites to estimate the determinants of clicks received by online...

Clearinghouse models of online pricing---such as Varian (1980), Rosenthal (1980), Narasimhan (1988), and Baye-Morgan (2001)---view a price comparison site as an "information clearinghouse" where shoppers and loyals obtain price and product information to make online purchases. These models...

We model a homogeneous product environment where identical e-retailers endogenously engage in both brand advertising (to create loyal customers) and price advertising (to attract "shoppers"). Our analysis allows for "cross-channel" effects; indeed, we show that price advertising is a substitute...

Organizational theory suggests that authority should lie in the hands of those with information, yet the power to transfer authority is rarely absolute in practice. We investigate the validity and application of this advice in a model of optimal contracting between an uninformed principal and...

The recent theoretical literature suggests that consumer myopia may lead firms to profitably suppress or shroud some attributes of the price. Empirical and experimental data also suggest that sellers gain by transferring a larger fraction of the price to the shrouded attributes. However,...

The equilibrium model of Ellison, Fudenberg, and Möbius (2004) predicts that, if two competing auction sites are coexisting, then seller revenues and buyer-seller ratios on each site should be approximately equal. We examine these hypotheses using field experiments selling identical items on...

We study the value of commitment in contests and tournaments when there are costs for the follower to observe the leader's behavior. In a contest, the follower can pay to observe the leader's effort but cannot observe the effectiveness of that effort. In a tournament, the follower can pay to...

Timing is crucial in situations ranging from product introductions, to currency attacks, to starting a revolution. These settings share the feature that payoffs depend critically on the timing of moves of a few other key players—and these are uncertain. To capture this, we introduce the...