This paper investigates a model featuring a monopolist seller and a buyer, with an uncertain valuation for the seller’s product. The seller chooses an information system (“IS”), allowing the buyer to receive a private signal, potentially correlated with her valuation. The cost of the IS is proportional to its precision, measured by the mutual information between the distributions of the buyer’s...

The standard monopoly pricing problem is re-considered when the buyer’s type (e.g. age, income, experience) can be credibly disclosed at some cost. In the optimal sales mechanism with costly disclosure, the seller posts a “sticker price” available to any buyer, as well as a schedule of discounts available to those who disclose certain types. Unambiguous welfare implications are available in the...

We consider the problem of buying physical goods with cryptocurrencies. There is an inherent circular dependency: should be the buyer trust the seller and pay before receiving the goods or should the seller trust the buyer and ship the goods before receiving payment? This dilemma is addressed in practice using a third party escrow service. However, we show that naive escrow protocols introduce ...

Many disputes between buyers and sellers concern product quality and whether a claim of poor product performance is covered by a warranty issued by the seller. We develop an analytical framework in which average product quality, buyer preferences, production and transaction costs, and the extent to which "true" quality can be observed by buyer and seller interact to determine warranties, produc...

We study a dynamic mechanism design problem in which a buyer seeks to procure an item from a single seller in multiple periods. The seller is privately informed about her procurement cost at each period, and this cost may be serially correlated over time. We restrict the buyer to use mechanisms satisfying a limited liability constraint: the seller’s flow payoffs must be non-negative at each per...

Buyer–seller relationships among firms can be regarded as a longitudinal network in which the connectivity pattern evolves as each firm receives productivity shocks. Based on a data set describing the evolution of buyer–seller links among 55,608 firms over a decade and structural equation modeling, we find some evidence that interfirm networks evolve reflecting a firm’s local decisions to mitig...