Biofuel production has recently attracted a great deal of attention. Some anticipate substantial social and environmental benefits, while at the same time expecting sound profitability for investors. Others are more doubtful, envisaging large trade-offs between the pursuit of social,...

We develop a dynamic model to study the formation of communication networks. In this model, individuals periodically make decisions concerning the continuation of existing information links and the formation of new information links, with their cohorts. These decisions trade off the costs of...

This paper presents experimental evidence about how individuals learn from information that comes from inside versus outside their ethnic group. In the experiment, Thai subjects observed information that came from Americans and other Thais that they could use to help them answer a series of...

I analyze a model of directed search in which a consumer inspects a finite number of products sharing attributes with each others. The consumer discovers her valuation for the attributes of the inspected products and adapts her search strategy based on what she has learned. The consumer...

We study third-degree price discrimination in the presence of uninformed buyers who extract noisy information from observing prices. In a noisy learning environment, price discrimination can be detrimental to the firm and beneficial to the consumers. On the one hand, discriminatory pricing...

This paper deals with artificial agents buying and selling products in a virtual market of goods that may be substituted for each other. On the demand side the market features a homogenous group of agents whose dynamics are determined by three different scenarios. The supply side, on the other...

We consider the impact of history on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods, whose quality is learned slowly. If the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers, a sufficiently bad run of luck could induce her to stop selling. When she knows...

We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

We present a diagrammatic and step-by-step analysis of price signaling quality. Because quality is a continuum on the real positive line, out-of-equilibrium beliefs need not be specified, i.e., every positive price is a positive outcome in equilibrium. We first study the behavior of the monopoly...

The aim of this research is to analyze whether and when ratings are informative signals about the quality of movies. The ratings data of Netflix is used to fit a structural Bayesian learning model. This model links revealed experience utilities of raters, previous consumers, to the product...