In many industries, firms reward their customers for making referrals. We analyze the optimal policy mix of price, advertising intensity, and referral fee for a monopoly when buyers choose to what extent to refer other consumers to the firm. We find that the firm uses its referral fee, but not...

The authors develop a model of cheap talk with multiple speakers in the presence of network externalities so that their utility functions are increasing in the network size. They first show that if there is no noise in private information that each sender receives, the full information is...

We study a competitive market for a homogeneous good, in which the only uncertainty concerns the number of identical sellers, who are sampled by a finite Poisson process from a continuum of potential participants. It is shown that, in equilibrium, there is price dispersion. Specifically, prices...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and - potentially - shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

In the paper, we investigate the Hoede-Bakker index - the notion which computes the overall decisional 'power' of a player in a social network. It is assumed that each player has an inclination (original decision) to say 'yes' or 'no' which, due to influence of other players, may be different...

We investigate the equilibrium relationship between product quality and word-of-mouth communication. Specifically, we ask whether firms should optimally produce "better" products when consumers are more likely to exchange information? The critical moderating factor in our model is the nature of...

We study a stochastic model of influence where agents have “yes” or “no” inclinations on some issue, and opinions may change due to mutual influence among the agents. Each agent independently aggregates the opinions of the other agents and possibly herself. We study influence processes...

We present a new recommender system developed for the Russian interactive radio network FMhost. The system aims to improve the quality of this service; it is designed specifically to deal with small datasets, overcoming the shortage of data on observed user behavior. The underlying model combines...

Advance selling is widely used in practice, but in significantly different formats. For some products sellers offer discounts during advance selling, while for other products sellers charge a premium. Some sellers make all capacity available for advance selling, while others limit (ration)...

We revisit the classical result that taxation of private consumption is distortionary and therefore precludes the efficient provision of public goods. We introduce a nonlinear consumption tax which we call a `tax lottery'. Under this scheme, an ad-valorem consumption tax is supplemented with a...