Date: Apr.22^nd, 2019

Time: 12:00-13:30

Speaker: SHI Fanqi

Venue: Room 418, School of Economics, Yuquan Campus

[Speaker Intro]

SHI Fanqi is a Job Market Candidate from Stanford University. He works on microeconomic theory, with specialization in market and mechanism design. His research mainly analyzes how specific markets work, and how one can devise the rules of the market to improve market outcome.

【Abstract】

Increasingly many products feature “network externalities": the utility of one's consumption increases in his neighbors' consumption. Although information of network structure is important to the seller, it is often privately known to the buyers. We model a monopoly's (constrained) optimal pricing strategy to “screen” buyer's network information: their susceptibility (out-degree) and influence (in-degree). We characterize the optimal allocation for both the case of directed networks where each buyer's influence and susceptibility are independent, and the case of undirected networks where the two are identical. For directed networks, we show the optimal allocation can only depend on a buyer's susceptibility and is linear in virtual type (of susceptibility) with quadratic intrinsic value. For undirected networks, we disentangle the different effects of influence and susceptibility on optimal allocation and show that with quadratic intrinsic value, the allocation is a linear combination of a buyer's type and virtual type. We contrast the analysis with two benchmarks, the complete information pricing and uniform pricing, to shed light on the value of network information. We also extend the model to accommodate for weak affiliation between a buyer's influence and susceptibility, and the situation where influence and susceptibility are endogenous to the optimal allocation.