We study a buyer-seller problem of a novel good for which the seller does not yet know the production cost. A contract can be agreed upon at either the ex-ante stage, before learning the cost, or at the ex-post stage, when both parties will incur a costly delay, but the seller knows the...

Bargaining over two issues as a bundle permits credible cheap talk about their relative importance even when interests are directly opposed on each issue. The resulting communication gains can exceed the gains from bundling previously identified in the monopoly pricing literature

Firms nowadays are increasingly proactive in trying to strategically capitalize on consumer networks and social interactions. In this paper, we complement an emerging body of research on the engineering of word-of-mouth (WOM) effects by exploring a different angle through which firms can...

In consumer-to-consumer online platforms that enable selling (e.g., eBay, Taobao) or sharing (e.g., Airbnb, Uber) of goods and services, information asymmetry between providers (e.g., sellers, hosts, drivers) and consumers (e.g., buyers, guests, passengers) pose challenges. Such platforms...

The traditional theory of monopolistic screening tackles individual self-selection but does not address the possibility that buyers could form a coalition to coordinate their purchases and to reallocate the goods. In this paper, we design the optimal sale mechanism which takes into account both...

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible, and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed-fee pricing in addition...

This paper introduces joint product design and non-linear pricing in the context of sharing markets. Product ecosystems enable user sensing, setting the stage for the control of post-purchase consumption patterns. By varying the degree to which products can be reused and transferred among peers,...

A data broker sells market segmentations created by consumer data to a producer with private production cost who sells a product to a unit mass of consumers with heterogeneous values. In this setting, I completely characterize the revenue-maximizing mechanisms for the data broker. In particular,...

We study the information design problem in a single-unit auction setting. The information designer controls independent private signals according to which the buyers infer their binary private value. Assuming that the seller adopts Myerson (1981) optimal auction in response, we characterize both...

This paper uses tools provided by lattice theory to describe the second-degree price discrimination problem faced by a monopolist seller of a network good, and to give a complete characterization of the optimal contracts it can use. We build a general model in a discrete and a continuous type...