Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to...

In many settings where pricing is delegated to salespeople, firms provide the salespeople incentives to not only sell more, but also to do so at higher prices. In this paper, we study the relative importance of pricing-focused and revenue-focused incentives, and quantify the profitability of...

This paper is an empirical examination of observational learning. Using data from an online market for music, I find that observational learning benefits consumers, producers of high-quality music, and the online platform. I also study the role of pricing as a friction to the learning pro- cess...

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...