This paper investigates whether aggregate consumer learning together with consumer heterogeneity in price sensitivity could explain why (i) there is a slow diffusion of generic drugs into the market, and (ii) brand-name originators keep increasing their prices over time even after the number of...

Consumers choosing flat-rate contracts tend to have insufficient usage to warrant the cost, particularly for new products. We propose and estimate a Bayesian learning model of tariff and usage choice that explains this "flat-rate bias'' without relying on behavioral misjudgments or...

The consumer search literature mostly considers independently distributed products. In contrast, I study a model of directed search with infinitely many products whose valuations are correlated through shared attributes. I propose a tractable, systematic, history-dependent scoring system based...

We characterize the dynamics of an industry in which demand and costs are constantly evolving so that firms are always adjusting output in response. Firms receive private information about their costs and privately observe components of demand. In addition, firms extract information from prices...

I explore the endogenous joint evolution of demand and supply in new markets. Firms and consumers learn, in a Bayesian fashion, by observing the behavior of other firms and consumers, respectively. As a result, endogenous information diffusion takes place on both sides of the market. In...

We address the issue of risk aversion in a competitive equilibrium when some buyers engage in learning and information is conveyed through the price system. Specifically, since the learning process yields uncertainty, we study the effect of risk aversion on the equilibrium outcomes of the model,...

I investigate the identification of social learning in online markets. In these markets, there is often a two-stage decision making process where a consumer first chooses whether or not to search a product and then chooses whether or not to buy it. Additionally, the social learning signals are...

Self-interested agents produce information in an attempt to convince a principal to act on their behalf. Agents provide less informative evidence than the principal prefers since doing so maximizes the probability the principal acts in their favor. If the principal faces constraints that limit...

Hotellings berühmtes "Prinzip der minimalen Differenzierung" behauptet, dass zwei Firmen, die sich miteinander in räumlichem Wettbewerb befinden, dieselbe Position wählen. Wenn man räumlichen Wettbewerb als Modellierung von Produktdifferenzierung versteht, bedeutet dieses, dass die Firmen...

Hotelling’s famous ‘Principle of Minimum Differentiation’ suggests that two firms engaging in spatial competition will decide to locate at the same place. Interpreting spatial competition as modeling product differentiation, firms will thus offer products that are not differentiated and...