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Mark Whitmeyer

Publications and source records attributed to Mark Whitmeyer.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Comparison Shopping: Learning Before Buying From Duopolists

We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is cheap, increasing the cost of information decreases consumer welfare; but when information is expensive, this relationship flips. As information frictions vanish, there is a limiting equilibrium that is ex post efficient.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2023

A More Informed Sender Benefits the Receiver When the Sender Has Transparent Motives

A sender with state-independent preferences (i.e., transparent motives) privately observes a signal about the state of the world before sending a message to a receiver, who subsequently takes an action. Regardless of whether the receiver can mediate--and commit to a garbling of the sender's message--or delegate--commit to a stochastic decision rule as a function of the message--and understanding the statement ``the receiver is better off as a result of an improvement of the sender's information'' to mean that her maximal and minimal equilibrium payoffs (weakly) increase as the sender's signal improves (in a Blackwell sense), we find that if the sender is more informed, the receiver is better off.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2022

Costly Evidence and Discretionary Disclosure

A sender flexibly acquires evidence--which she may pay a third party to certify--to disclose to a receiver. When evidence acquisition is overt, the receiver observes the evidence gathering process irrespective of whether its outcome is certified. When acquisition is covert, the receiver does not. In contrast to the case with exogenous evidence, the receiver prefers a strictly positive certification cost. As acquisition costs vanish, equilibria converge to the Pareto-worst free-learning equilibrium. The receiver always prefers covert to overt evidence acquisition.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2022

Attraction versus Persuasion: Information Provision in Search Markets

We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game, the countervailing incentives of attraction and persuasion yield a payoff function for each firm that is linear in the firm's realized effective value. If the expected quality of the products is sufficiently high (or competition is sufficiently fierce), this corresponds to full information--firms provide the first-best level of information. If not, this corresponds to information dispersion--firms randomize over signals.

math.PR↗
arXiv2021

Whose Bias?

Law enforcement acquires costly evidence with the aim of securing the conviction of a defendant, who is convicted if a decision-maker's belief exceeds a certain threshold. Either law enforcement or the decision-maker is biased and is initially overconfident that the defendant is guilty. Although an innocent defendant always prefers an unbiased decision-maker, he may prefer that law enforcement have some bias to none. Nevertheless, fixing the level of bias, an innocent defendant may prefer that the decision-maker, not law enforcement, is biased.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2021

Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests

This paper investigates stochastic continuous time contests with a twist: the designer requires that contest participants incur some cost to submit their entries. When the designer wishes to maximize the (expected) performance of the top performer, a strictly positive submission fee is optimal. When the designer wishes to maximize total (expected) performance, either the highest submission fee or the lowest submission fee is optimal.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2021

Search and Competition with Flexible Investigations

We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their visits. We characterize a consumer's optimal search and information acquisition protocol and analyze the pricing game between firms. Notably, we establish that in search markets there are fundamental differences between search frictions and information frictions, which affect market prices, profits, and consumer welfare in markedly different ways. Although higher search costs beget higher prices (and profits for firms), higher information acquisition costs lead to lower prices and may benefit consumers. We discuss implications of our findings for policies concerning disclosure rules and hidden fees.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2021

Persuasion Produces the (Diamond) Paradox

This paper extends the sequential search model of Wolinsky (1986) by allowing firms to choose how much match value information to disclose to visiting consumers. This restores the Diamond paradox (Diamond 1971): there exist no symmetric equilibria in which consumers engage in active search, so consumers obtain zero surplus and firms obtain monopoly profits. Modifying the scenario to one in which prices are advertised, we discover that the no-active-search result persists, although the resulting symmetric equilibria are ones in which firms price at marginal cost.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2020

Mixtures of Mean-Preserving Contractions

Given a purely atomic probability measure with support on n points, P, any mean-preserving contraction (mpc) of P, Q, with support on m > n points is a mixture of mpcs of P, each with support on most n points. We illustrate an application of this result in economics.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2020

Competing to Persuade a Rationally Inattentive Agent

Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure by two senders, in which the receiver may garble each sender's experiment, subject to a cost increasing in the informativeness of the garbling. For a large class of parameters, it is an equilibrium for the senders to provide the receiver's first best level of information - i.e. as much as she would learn if she herself controlled information provision. Information on one sender substitutes for information on the other, which nullifies the profitability of a unilateral provision of less information. Thus, we provide a novel channel through which competition with attention costs encourages information disclosure.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2018

A Game of Nontransitive Dice

We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$, there is a unique Nash Equilibrium in pure strategies. The unique Nash Equilibrium is for each player to throw the Standard $n$-sided die, where each side has a different number. Our proof of uniqueness is constructive. We introduce an algorithm with which, for any nonstandard die, we may generate another die that beats it.

math.PR↗
arXiv2018

Some Nontrivial Properties of a Formula for Compound Interest

We analyze the classical model of compound interest with a constant per-period payment and interest rate. We examine the outstanding balance function as well as the periodic payment function and show that the outstanding balance function is not generally concave in the interest rate, but instead may be initially convex on its domain and then concave.

econ.GN↗
arXiv2018

A Game of Random Variables

This paper analyzes a simple game with $n$ players. We fix a mean, $μ$, in the interval $[0, 1]$ and let each player choose any random variable distributed on that interval with the given mean. The winner of the zero-sum game is the player whose random variable has the highest realization. We show that the position of the mean within the interval is paramount. Remarkably, if the given mean is above a crucial threshold then the unique equilibrium must contain a point mass on $1$. The cutoff is strictly decreasing in the number of players, $n$; and for fixed $μ$, as the number of players is increased, each player places more weight on $1$ at equilibrium. We characterize the equilibrium as the number of players goes to infinity.

math.PR↗