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Strategic Limitation of Market Accessibility: Search Platform Design and Welfare - Christopher Teh

Tracks
Room CBE LT4
Friday, June 30, 2023
12:25 PM - 12:55 PM

Speaker

Mr Christopher Teh
Phd Student
The University of New South Wales

Strategic Limitation of Market Accessibility: Search Platform Design and Welfare

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between market accessibility and various participants’ welfare in an intermediated directed-search market. For a general class of meeting technologies, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which efficiency requires imperfect accessibility, such that each seller’s listing is only observed by some but not all buyers. We show that the platform optimally implements the efficient outcome, but fully extracts surplus from the transactions it intermediates. We also find that in general, buyers prefer to minimize market accessibility, while sellers prefer a weakly greater accessibility level than that which is socially efficient. The efficiency of imperfect accessibility is robust to the introduction of a second chance for unmatched buyers to search.

Biography

Chris Teh is a PhD student at The University of New South Wales, supervised by Professor Richard Holden, Professor Keiichi Kawai and Professor Anton Kolotilin. His research is broadly related to the fields of Information Design and Industrial Organisation, with a focus on their applications to the study of digital platforms.
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