A large economics literature seeks to understand the reasons why individuals make charitable contributions. Fundamental features of most models of charitable giving are the inclusion of externalities induced by other agents and the Lancasterian characteristics approach to specifying utility...

A large economics literature seeks to understand the reasons why individuals make charitable contributions. Fundamental features of most models of charitable giving are the inclusion of externalities induced by other agents and the Lancasterian characteristics approach to specifying utility...

In an economy in which a producer must learn the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the producer has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of...

We explore a scenario in which a monopolist producer of information goods seeks to maximize its profits in a market where consumer demand shifts frequently and unpredictably. The producer is free to set an arbitrarily complex price schedule-a function that maps the set of purchased items to a...

Information goods can be reconfigured at low cost. Therefore, firms can choose how to differentiate their products at a frequency comparable to price changes. However, doing so effectively is complicated by uncertainty about customer preferences, compounded by the fact that the search for a good...

Digital information economies require information goods producers to learn how to position themselves within a potentially vast product space. Further, the topography of this space is often nonstationary, due to the interactive dynamics of multiple producers changing their position as they try...

This study clarifies the conditions under which learning in games produces convergence to Nash equilibria in practice. Previous work has identified theoretical conditions under which various stylized learning processes achieve convergence. One technical condition is supermodularity, which is...