讲座题目：Industry-optimal Information in Search Market

主讲人：胡岠  北京大学国家发展研究院

讲座时间：4月14日14:00

讲座地点：腾讯会议：246-772-862

内容摘要：

This paper studies the welfare effects of information in a sequential consumer search environment. Consumers search in the market and observe a noisy signal about the match value upon being matched with a firm, based on which they make their purchasing decisions. We construct the class of conditional unit-elastic demand signal distributions such that every equilibrium that can possibly arise under a feasible signal distribution can be achieved by a signal distribution within this class, based on which we investigate the industry-optimal information in this market. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that lower search cost promotes competition and reduces industry surplus, we find that the optimal industry surplus is strictly increasing as the search cost decreases. We also characterize the industry-optimal signal distribution for a large class of value distributions.

主讲人简介：

胡岠，宾夕法尼亚大学经济学博士，北京大学国家发展研究院教授。主要研究领域是微观经济理论、博弈论和信息经济学。研究成果发表于经济理论的顶级期刊Journal of Economic Theory，The Rand Journal of Economics等。