This paper analyzes the competitive role of retail shopping experience in markets with consumer search costs. We examine how a retailer's advantage in providing consumer shopping experience affects its equilibrium pricing and price advertising strategies. We find that if the consumer valuation...

Much of experimental research in marketing has focused on individual choices. Yet in many contexts, the outcomes of one’s choices depend on the choices of others. Furthermore, the results obtained in individual decision making context may not be applicable to these strategic choices. In this...

We consider competition between firms that design and use algorithms to target consumers. Firms first choose the design of a supervised learning algorithm in terms of the complexity of the model or the number of variables to accommodate. Each firm then appoints a data analyst to estimate demand...

An important phenomenon on the Internet has been the emergence of "infomediaries" or Internet referral services such as Autobytel.com and Carpoint.com in the automobile industry, Avviva.com in real estate and Healthcareadvocates.com in medicine. These services offer consumers the opportunity to...

Recently, we have experienced an emergence of comparative "Internet Shopping Agents" (ISAs) that allow consumers to costlessly search across many online retailers and buy at the lowest price. An ISA can be thought of as an institution that creates all or nothing type of competition in the...

We study the dynamic information design problem of a firm seeking to influence consumer checking behavior by designing push notifications. Firm payoffs are increasing in the frequency of consumer checking. The consumer is uncertain about the arrival of information as well as its valuation. In...

This paper investigates a contest in information revelation between firms that seek to persuade consumers by revealing positive own information and negative information about the rival. In the face of limited bandwidth, firms are forced to make a trade-off between disclosing their own positive...

This paper examines the sunk cost fallacy as a self-commitment device in mitigating self-control problems and analyzes its implications for contract design. The sunk cost fallacy can lead to over-consumption and escalation of commitment. We show that consumers anticipate the fallacy ex-ante, and...

The paper provides evidence of the effectiveness of massively scalable automated SMS business training. The training has negligible marginal costs and requires only basic cell phone coverage for enrollment. We conducted a large-scale Randomized Control Trial in which we randomly manipulated the...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in a gambling environment consumers may end up betting more than they had initially planned. The authors assess this phenomenon in a series of three experiments, where people are exposed to sequential and fair gambles in a two-stage process (planned and actual...