Events

Information Provision in Markets

Tech-mediated markets give individuals an unprecedented number of opportunities. Students no longer need to attend their neighborhood school; through school choice programs they can apply to any school in their city. Tourists no longer need to wander streets looking for restaurants; they can select among them on an app from the comfort of their hotel rooms. Theoretically, this increased access improves outcomes. However, realizing these potential gains requires individuals to be able to navigate their options and make informed decisions. In this talk, we explore how markets can help guide individuals through this process by providing relevant information. We first discuss a school choice market where students must exert costly effort to learn their preferences. We show that posting exam score cutoffs breaks information deadlocks allowing students to efficiently evaluate their options. We next study a recommendation app which can selectively reveal past reviews to users. We show that it’s possible to facilitate learning across users by creating a hierarchical network structure in which early users explore and late users exploit the results of this exploration.