Research

Job Market Paper

Accuracy Discrimination in Personalized Product Recommendation

Abstract: I examine how a platform designs personalized product recommendations with discriminatory accuracy based on consumers’ preference intensities to maximize the probability of trade. The platform can increase recommendation accuracy for a consumer at the cost of the consumer’s privacy and higher endogenous prices set by third-party firms. When consumers’ types are observable, the platform’s optimal mechanism is perfectly misaligned with consumer preferences: it offers accurate recommendations only to “picky” consumers who benefit the least, thereby minimizing ex post consumer surplus. In contrast, when the platform must screen consumers, it behaves as if maximizing ex post consumer surplus by allowing consumers to self-select their most preferred accuracy levels. The results highlight the importance of requiring platforms to obtain consumers’ consent before providing personalized services, even when the platform’s interests are partly aligned with those of consumers.

Working Paper

Trade Delay from Second-Order Uncertainty in Bargaining

Abstract: This paper studies a bargaining model with second-order uncertainty, in which the quality of the good is privately observed by the seller, while the buyer receives a private signal about the seller's type before bargaining begins. As a result, the seller signals his type through pricing while facing uncertainty about the buyer's belief. I introduce the notions of weak delay and strong delay, both of which allow persistent trade delay as frictions vanish, but differ in whether vanishing delay is also possible. The results show that trade delay is sensitive to the structure of additional information. Without high-type exclusion, additional information leads to weak delay, in the sense that delay can be arbitrarily close to zero. When there exists a high-type-excluding message, additional information leads to strong delay, in the sense that delay is strictly bounded away from zero. The underlying mechanism behind the breakdown of the Coase conjecture is novel: it arises from the gap between the market-clearing price and the seller’s lowest guaranteed payoff, rather than relying on the presence of an exclusive message as in the existing literature.    

Earlier Publications

Bayesian truncation errors in equations of state of nuclear matter with chiral nucleon-nucleon potentials, joint with Jinniu Hu and Ying Zhang, Physics Letters B 798 (2019): 134982.

How New Rural Cooperative Medical System Affect Labor Supply of Middle-Aged and Elderly Population in Rural Areas: Based on Analysis of Dynamic Stochastic Model, joint with Zhaona, Finance and Economics(in Chinese)