Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

A physician performs two tasks: making diagnoses and determining treatments. To reduce medical error, residents are supposed to consult their supervisors when they face uncommon circumstances. However, recent research shows that residents are reluctant to do so. This paper presents a model that...

Recent theories suggest that consumers' search efforts are a function of prices and prices changes, respectively. This may help to explain the 'rockets and feathers' phenomenon often assigned to collusion – prices rise like rockets when costs increase and fall like feathers when costs...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...

Prices usually adjust much faster when costs increase than when costs decrease. The mechanism driving this Rockets-and-Feathers phenomenon is not well understood despite of ample empirical evidence for its existence.We use simple experimental markets with and without consumer search and either...

Consumers often complain that retail prices respond faster to increases in wholesale prices than to decreases. Despite many empirical studies confirming this "Rockets-and-Feathers" phenomenon for different industries, the mechanism driving it is not well understood. In this paper, we show that,...

I study a model of oligopolistic competition in which consumers search for prices, but have no idea about the underlying price distribution. Consumers' behaviour satisfies four consistency requirements such that beliefs about the underlying distribution maximize Shannon entropy. I derive the...

A physician performs two tasks: making diagnoses and determining treatments. To reduce medical error, residents are supposed to consult their supervisors when they face uncommon circumstances. However, recent research shows that residents are reluctant to do so. This paper presents a model that...

We address the question of designing dynamic menus to sell experience goods. A dynamic menu consists of a set of price-quantity pairs in each period. The quality of the product is initially unknown, and more information is generated through experimentation. The amount of information in the...

When experts have superior information on their customers' needs and appropriate treatment/repair/advice is a credence good, there are obvious incentives for opportunistic behavior. What compounds this is that experts regularly make treatment recommendations and price offers only after consumers...