In many instances of price discrimination, a seller of an item is in possession of signals from competing buyers regarding their private valuation for the item. While intuition may suggest that a seller should always exploit all available information, our paper shows that it is actually in the interests of the seller to strategically ignore the information contained in the signals with positive...

To explain, the ratings provided by advisors are possibly unfair. Buyers may provide unfairly high ratings to promote the seller. This is referred to as “ballot stuffing” (Dellarocas 2000). Buyers may also provide unfairly low ratings, in order to cooperate with other sellers to drive a seller out of the marketplace. This is referred to as “bad-mouthing”. Besides the problem of unfair ratings, ...

We study asymmetric second-price auctions under incomplete information. The bidders have two potentially different, commonly known, valuations for the object and private information about their entry costs. seller, however, does not benefit from these calculate equilibrium strategies of analyze optimal design seller in this environment terms expected number potential bidders.

On a “marketplace” platform, where two sides of users trade, the platform owner has an incentive to regulate its marketplace for a higher profit. This study focuses on a monopoly platform’s nonpricing, regulatory strategies in governing quality heterogeneity of competing sellers. In contrast to related studies, we endogenize strategic interactions among platform users. Our model extends the cir...