Essays on information disclosure and auction theory
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation consists of three essays on information economics and auction theory. The first chapter studies the question of what information consumers should disclose to firms. A consumer discloses information to a multi-product firm, which learns about his preferences, sets prices, and makes product recommendations. While the consumer benefits from disclosure as it enables the firm to make accurate recommendations, the firm may use the information to price discriminate. I show that the firm prefers to commit to not price discriminate, which encourages the consumer to provide information that is useful for product recommendations. However, nondiscriminatory pricing hurts the consumer, who would be better off by precommitting to withhold some information. In contrast to single-product models, equilibrium is typically inefficient even if the consumer can disclose any information about his preferences. The second chapter studies the problem of restricting the information available to the sender in a game of strategic communication. Assuming that the receiver has a binary choice, I characterize the "optimal information restriction, " which maximizes the equilibrium payoff of the receiver among all the information restrictions for the sender. The final chapter studies the optimal timing of an auction in a setting where bidders arrive and depart stochastically over time. First, we compare the revenue-maximizing timing and welfare-maximizing timing. We show that sellers hold auctions too late or too early whenever (censored at 0) virtual values are more or less right-skewed than values. In particular, we show that sellers typically hold auctions inefficiently late. Second, we prove that the use of simple timing rules (i.e., a fixed deadline chosen in advance) can lose an arbitrarily large fraction of the revenue from the optimal stopping rule.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Ichihashi, Shota |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Milgrom, Paul R. (Paul Robert), 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Milgrom, Paul R. (Paul Robert), 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Carroll, Gabriel |
| Thesis advisor | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Thesis advisor | Segal, Ilya |
| Degree committee member | Carroll, Gabriel |
| Degree committee member | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Degree committee member | Segal, Ilya |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Shota Ichihashi. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Shota Ichihashi
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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