团队

Big data and data technology have facilitated the widespread adoption of personalized pricing practices. While price personalization enables firms to extract greater rent from consumers, it often reduces price transparency, which can negatively impact firm profits in situations involving consumer coordination. In such contexts, a firm's commitment to pricing strategies can become essential for restoring profitability. We explore several commitment devices available to firms and discuss their implications. These devices include delegating pricing decisions to a manager who prioritizes consumer surplus, leveraging existing networks as signals for later consumers or to build reputation, and implementing uniform pricing or price caps in response to regulatory restrictions.

人工智能技术高速发展，有机会被部分借款者用来美化其信贷资料以获批贷款。贷款方与其透过多方面大量收集数据审批借款者，倒不如自我设限，集中提高收集数据的质量，同时增加贷款利润。

We study voluntary cost disclosure by duopoly firms when they can invest in a cost-reduction technology, i.e., when their private cost is endogenously determined. We find that, contrary to most of the literature, firms disclose their endogenous cost information regardless of the type of competition. The underlying mechanisms and welfare implications, however, are different. Under Bertrand competition, cost disclosure helps a firm avoid aggressive investment in cost reduction to coordinate actions to the mutual advantage of the duopoly firms. Under Cournot competition, disclosing cost information enables a firm to show a hardened stance toward the competing firm. Although firms gain from their disclosure decisions under Bertrand competition, their disclosure decisions under Cournot competition place them in a prisoner’s dilemma, as both firms would be better off if they chose not to disclose their information. Consequently, consumers may lose under Bertrand competition but gain under Cournot competition.

We study information sharing between strategic investors who are informed about asset fundamentals. We demonstrate that a coarsely informed investor optimally chooses to share information if his counterparty investor is well informed. By doing so, the coarsely informed investor invites the other investor to trade against his information, thereby reducing his price impact. Paradoxically, the well informed investor loses from receiving information because of the resulting worsened market liquidity and the more aggressive trading by the coarsely informed investor. Our analysis sheds light on phenomena such as private communications among investors and public information sharing on social media.