讲座题目： Uncharted Waters: Selling a New Product Robustly

主讲嘉宾：张堃 亚利桑那州立大学博士

讲座时间：2023年6月05日（周一）下午3：00--5：00

讲座地点：华中科技大学经济学院402室

内容提要：A seller introduces a novel product to an unfamiliar market. The seller sets a price and chooses how much information to provide 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 surplus extraction: information design can boost demand by deterring the buyer’s search, but this may require providing her with a high payoff via a low price. I find that full information is optimal only when the search cost is high, and different kinds of partial information provision policies are optimal for lower search costs. Perhaps surprisingly, the price is not monotone in the search cost. These results shed light on the large variations in information provision policies among new products, and suggest that technological advancements that reduce search costs may increase prices and make information provision noisier.

中文摘要：

卖家把一种新颖的产品介绍给一个陌生的市场。卖家设定价格，并选择向代表买家提供多少关于产品的信息，代表买家可能会产生搜索成本来发现外部选项。买方知道自己的外部期权分配，但卖方只知道其支持的均值和上限，并通过其保证利润来评估任何销售策略。稳健最优策略平衡了需求和盈余提取之间的权衡：信息设计可以通过阻止买家的搜索来提振需求，但这可能需要通过低价为她提供高回报。我发现，只有当搜索成本高时，完整信息才是最优的，而不同类型的部分信息提供策略对于较低的搜索成本是最优的。也许令人惊讶的是，搜索成本中的价格并不单调。这些结果揭示了新产品之间信息提供政策的巨大差异，并表明降低搜索成本的技术进步可能会提高价格并使信息提供更加嘈杂。

讲座嘉宾简介：

张堃，亚利桑那州立大学博士，2024年1月将加入澳大利亚昆士兰大学任讲师。主要研究信息经济学及其在产业组织理论和合约理论中的应用。