讲座题目：Uncharted Waters: Selling a New Product Robustly（未知水域：新产品的稳健定价策略）

主讲人：张堃  亚利桑那州立大学

讲座时间：2023年6月1日14:00

讲座地点：经管院C366

线上：腾讯会议：362-552-043

讲座内容摘要：

A seller introduces a novel product to an unfamiliar market. The seller sets a price and chooses how much information to provide about the product to a representative buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows her outside option distribution, but the seller knows only its mean and an upper bound on its support, and evaluates any selling strategy by its guaranteed profit. The robustly optimal strategy balances the trade-off between demand and surplus extraction: information design can boost demand by deterring the buyer’s search, but this may require providing her with a high payoff via a low price. I find that full information is optimal only when the search cost is high, and different kinds of partial information provision policies are optimal for lower search costs. Perhaps surprisingly, the price is not monotone in the search cost. These results shed light on the large variations in information provision policies among new products, and suggest that technological advancements that reduce search costs may increase prices and make information provision noisier.

一个卖家在一个陌生的市场推出一种新产品。卖家设定价格，并选择向代表性买家提供多少有关产品的信息。买家可能需要付出搜寻成本来了解其他选项。买家知道她的其他选项的分布，但卖家只知道其均值和支撑集的上界，并通过其最低利润保证评估任何销售策略。稳健最优策略在提高需求和剩余攫取之间权衡：信息设计可以通过阻止买家的搜寻来提高需求，但这可能需要通过设定低价格来达到。研究发现，只有当买家的搜寻成本较高时，提供全部信息才是最优的；而对于较低的搜寻成本，多种提供部分信息的策略可能成为最优。另外，价格与搜寻成本之间并不是单调关系。这些结果为不同的新产品在信息提供策略上的较大差别提供了一个解释，并且表明降低搜寻成本的技术进步可能会提高价格并使卖家提供更少的信息。

主讲人个人信息

张堃，亚利桑那州立大学博士，2024年1月将加入澳大利亚昆士兰大学任讲师。主要研究信息经济学及其在产业组织理论和合约理论中的应用。