Two firms produce substitute goods with unknown quality. At each stage the firms set prices and a consumer with private information and unit demand buys from one of the firms. Both firms and consumers see the entire history of prices and purchases. Will such markets aggregate information? Will...

This paper provides a method to estimate search costs in a differentiated product environment in which consumers are uncertain about the utility distribution. Consumers learn about the utility distribution by Bayesian updating their Dirichlet process prior beliefs. The model provides expressions...

In this paper, we study an imperfect monitoring model of duopoly under similar settings as in Green and Porter (1984), but here firms do not know the demand parameters and learn about them over time through the price signals. We investigate how a deviation from rational expectations affects the...

The widespread use of market-making algorithms in electronic over-the-counter markets may give rise to unexpected effects resulting from the autonomous learning dynamics of these algorithms. In particular the possibility of `tacit collusion' among market makers has increasingly received...

Increasingly, firms use algorithms powered by artificial intelligence to set prices. Previous research studies interactions among Q-learning algorithms in a simulated oligopoly model of price competition. The algorithms learn collusive strategies but require a long time that corresponds to...

Recent experimental simulations have shown that autonomous pricing algorithms are able to learn collusive behavior and thus charge supra-competitive prices without being explicitly programmed to do so. These simulations assume, however, that both firms employ the identical price-setting...

We study optimal experimentation by a monopolistic platform in a two-sided market. The platform provider is uncertain about the strength of the externality each side is exerting on the other. Setting participation fees on both sides, it gradually learns about these externalities by observing...

We study optimal experimentation by a monopolistic platform in a two-sided mar- ket. The platform provider faces uncertainty about the strength of the externality each side is exerting on the other. It maximizes the expected present value of its profit stream in a continuous-time...

We study optimal experimentation by a monopolistic platform in a two-sided market framework. The platform provider faces uncertainty about the strength of the externality each side is exerting on the other. It maximizes the expected present value of its profit stream in a continuous-time...

The increasing pervasiveness of social networks allows users to share purchase behaviors with their online friends. In the present study, we examine optimal pricing strategies of a monopolistic firm using an analytical model that accounts for behavioral observational learning in social networks....