The paper studies the impact of homophily on the optimal strategies of a monopolist, whose marketing campaign of new product relies on a word of mouth communication. Homophily is a tendency of people to interact more with those who are similar to them. In the model there are two types of...

There is wide-ranging evidence, much of it deriving from economics experiments, of ‘anomalies’ in behaviour that challenge standard preference theories. This paper explores the implications of these anomalies for preference elicitation methods. Because methods that are used to inform public...

This paper considers a dynamic duopoly market with strategic, price setting firms and an infinite set of fully rational, privately informed consumers who enter the market sequentially. I show that there exists a sequential equilibrium in which prices converge to their realized product qualities...

In the paper, I examine free entry in homogeneous product markets and its social efficiency. Previous research on free entry in homogeneous product markets has shown that under Cournot oligopoly with fixed setup costs the free entry equilibrium always delivers excessive entry. In contrast, I...

This paper analyses lawyer's choices of law in international sales contracts. It identifies key reasons for opting in or out of the CISG across different jurisdictions. The paper then examines aspects of this choice from economic and psychological perspectives: from the ability to externalize...

Should the FTC have allowed Zillow to acquire its foremost rival, Trulia? It is increasingly well-accepted that digital platforms tend toward dominance in their immediately adjacent relevant-product markets. Google, for example, has long held a majority share of the markets for general-search...

Many markets feature sequentially mixed search (SMS), which has directed search followed by noisy matching with multiple offers. I construct a simple model of SMS, establish existence of a unique equilibrium, and analyze the novel implications of the equilibrium on quantities and price...

To answer the question in the title, this paper characterizes the socially efficient organization of the market with search frictions. The efficient organization depends on the relative elasticity in the supply between the two sides of the market, the costs of participating in the market and...

The impact of product variety on welfare has received little attention in the electronic commerce literature. The problem with product variety is that more variety does not necessarily imply higher welfare. This paper finds the conditions under which more variety, if caused by lower fixed costs,...

We analyze the firm-external effects of dynamic prices in a sequential market with a monopolistic firm. The product is offered to an infinite sequence of rational consumers each of whom observes a private signal regarding the product quality. We show that dynamic prices are necessary for...