Nathan Larson

Private Value Perturbations and Informational Advantage in Common Value Auctions

We analyze the value of being better informed than ones rival in a two bidder, second price common value auction. Standard models of these auctions do not pin down relative bidding postures, but we show that by adding small amounts of private value information, a unique equilibrium can be restored. Additional common value information affects a bidders payoff both directly, by increasing his information rent, and indirectly, by shifting the relative bidding posture of his opponent. Although the latter effect need not be positive, we establish broad conditions under which bidders with more information do better than their rivals. We turn to information acquisition and release and show that the desire to influence relative bidding postures can lead sellers to create new information rents (by releasing information privately to only one bidder) and bidders to forego information rents (instead choosing to gather information that a rival already has).

Niche Products, Generic Products, and Consumer Search

We endogenize product design in a model of sequential search with random firm-consumer match value a la Wolinsky (1986) and Anderson and Renault (1999). We focus on a product design choice by which a firm can control the dispersion of consumer valuations for its product; we interpret low dispersion products as ‘generic’ and high dispersion products as ‘nichy.’ Equilibrium product design depends on a feedback loop: when reservation utility is high (low), the marginal customer’s match improves (worsens) with more nichy products, encouraging high (low) differentiation by firms. In turn, when firms offer more nichy products, this induces more intense search; depending on search costs, this could raise or lower consumers’ reservation utility. Remarkably, when the match distribution satisfies a hazard rate condition, firm and consumer interests align: equilibrium product design always adjusts to the level that maximizes utility. When this condition is not met, either multiple equilibria (one nichy, the other generic) or one asymmetric equilibrium (generic and nichy firms coexist) can arise; we argue that the former is more likely for common specifications of consumer preferences.

No-Trade in the Laboratory

We construct laboratory financial markets in which subjects can trade an asset whose value is unknown. Subjects receive private clues about the asset value and then set bid and ask prices at which they are willing to buy or to sell from the other participants. In some of our markets (experimental treatments), there are gains from trade, while in others there are no gains: trade is zero sum. Celebrated no-trade theorems state that differences in private information alone cannot explain trade in the zero sum case. We study whether purely informational trade is eliminated in our experimental markets with no gains. The comparison of our results for gains and no-gains treatments shows that subjects fail to reach the no-trade outcome by pure introspection, but they approach it over time through market feedback and learning. Furthermore, the less noisy the clue-asset relationship is, the closer trade comes to being eliminated entirely.

Bid-Based approach for pricing web service

We consider a problem of Web service resource allocation in an economic setting We assume that different requestors have different valuations for services and a deadline for executing a service, after which it is no longer required We formally show an optimal offline allocation that maximizes the total welfare, denoted as the total benefit of the requestors We then propose a bid-based approach to resource allocation and pricing for Web services Using a detailed simulation, we analyze its behavior and performance compared to other known algorithms We empirically show that flexibility in service price benefits both the provider in terms of profit and the requestors in terms of welfare. Our problem motivation stems from the expanding use of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for outsourcing enterprize activities While the most common method for pricing a Web service nowadays is a fixed-price policy (with a price of 0 in many cases), A Service-Oriented Architecture will increasingly generate competition among providers, underlying the importance of finding methodologies for pricing Web service execution.

Personalized Pricing and Advertising: An Asymmetric Equilibrium Analysis

We study personalized price competition with costly advertising among n quality-cost differentiated firms. Strategies involve mixing over both prices and whether to advertise. In equilibrium, only the top two firms advertise, earning “Bertrand-like” profits. Welfare losses initially rise then fall with the ad cost, with losses due to excessive advertising and sales by the “wrong” firm. When firms are symmetric, the symmetric equilibrium yields perverse comparative statics and is unstable. Our key results apply when demand is elastic, when ad costs are heterogeneous, and with noise in consumer tastes.

Match choice and Ghettoization in evolutionary games

Abstract I study how having a choice about who to play affects the conventions that arise in a population playing a 2×2 common interest game. Match choice allows agents playing “fragile but efficient” strategies to isolate themselves, raising their returns but making it harder for outsiders to duplicate their success. When agents are myopic, the second effect dominates: long run play can shift toward either the risk-dominant equilibrium (with common interests in matching ) or toward the inefficient equilibrium (with opposing interests in matching ). In contrast, when agents are patient, supra-Nash payoffs can be sustained.

Explaining deviations from equilibrium in auctions with avoidable fixed costs

Bidders often face avoidable fixed costs or other synergies that can make bidding decisions complex and risky, and market outcomes volatile. If bidders deviate from risk neutral best responses, either due to faulty optimization or a preference to avoid volatility, then equilibrium predictions can perform poorly. In this paper, we confront laboratory bidders with three auction formats that make bidding difficult in different ways. We find that measures of ‘difficulty’ provide a consistent explanation of deviations from best response bidding across the three formats.

Clustering on the Same News Sources in an Asset Market

We study the incentives to acquire information from exclusive news sources versus information from popular sources in a CARA-normal asset market. Each trader is able to observe one of a finite number of news sources. Clustering on the most precise source can happen for two reasons. One is standard: traders do not care that they dilute others’ profits by trading on the same information. The other reason is more novel: traders with different information sets may respond to the same news differently — when this is so, they can benefit by coordinating their attention on the same news source in order to take opposite sides of the market. News from such a source will generate abnormal volume that need not be accompanied by large price movement. Furthermore, we show that as the number of sources grows, traders concentrate their attention on a few of the best ones, leaving most information unexploited.

Strategic Delay in Global Games

Abstract We study strategic uncertainty in an investment coordination game when players have the option to delay acting. Absent the option to delay, the global games literature shows that efficient equilibrium outcomes are possible only when they are also risk dominant. In contrast, we show that when delay is not too costly, strategic uncertainty can encourage delay in such a way that efficient investment occurs whenever it is “worth waiting for.”