主题：Uncharted Waters: Selling a New Product Robustly
主讲人：张堃（美国亚利桑那州立大学）
主持人：杨仁琨（暨南大学）
会议时间：2022年11月23日（周三）上午10:00-11:30
腾讯会议：ID：505-527-946 密码：221123
摘 要:
A seller introduces a novel product to an unfamiliar market. The seller sets a price and chooses how much information to disclose about the product to a representative buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows her outside option distribution, but the seller knows only its mean and an upper bound on its support, and evaluates any selling strategy by its guaranteed profit. The robustly optimal strategy balances the trade-off between demand and extraction: information design can boost demand by deterring the buyer's search, but this requires providing her with a high payoff via a low price. I find that full disclosure is optimal only when the search cost is high, and different kinds of partial disclosure policies are optimal for lower search costs. Perhaps surprisingly, the price is not monotone in search cost. These results shed light on the large variations in information disclosure policies among new products, and suggest that improvements in information technology that reduce search costs may increase prices and make information provision noisier.
主讲人简介
张堃，美国亚利桑那州立大学经济系博士候选人。主要研究信息经济学及其在产业组织理论、合约理论、金融经济学中的应用。
