Working paper
“Consumer fairness concerns and third-degree price discrimination of two-sided platforms,” with Jing Su
Presentations: The 14th Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications 2025; 30th ENTER Jamboree 2025; XIII IBEO Workshop 2024; 7th Doctoral Workshop on the Economics of Digitization 2024; LiDAM Spring Doctoral Workshop in Economics 2023
Abstract
This paper studies how consumers’ concerns about fairness influence third-degree price discrimination of a two-sided monopoly platform. We show that the presence of fairness concerns creates a negative demand externality from low-willingness-to-pay to high-willingness-to-pay consumers, that is, charging less to the former reduces the latter’s demand. With this novel externality, price-discriminating among consumers triggers fairness concerns, which lowers consumer-side demand and ultimately restricts the platform’s profit exploitation from the seller side. Hence, a platform whose profit potential from sellers is larger would take consumers’ fairness concerns more seriously and price-discriminate less. The results can explain why some major online platforms-despite the profit potential of tailoring prices-shy away from price discrimination in response to consumers’ fairness concerns, while others always price-discriminate among consumers.
“Standardized testing for college entrance: evidence from a major reform in China,” with Philip Verwimp
Presentations: XIII IBEO Workshop 2024; LiDAM Spring Doctoral Workshop in Economics 2024; ECARES Xmas PhD Workshop 2021
Work in progress
“Manipulating price inequality aversion without obfuscation,” with Jing Su and Litao Duan
Presentations: ECARES St. Nicolas/Xmas PhD Workshop 2025
Abstract
We carried out two series of laboratory experiments to study how consumers’ aversion to disadvantageous price inequality among homogeneous goods can be manipulated without obfuscating price comparison. In Study I, we introduced different reference prices and varied the price difference that subjects could observe. High-price subjects showed distrust of the introduced reference prices, but their price inequality aversion was reassured by a higher reference price unconsciously when the price difference was neither large nor small enough for a binary salience judgment. In Study II, we varied the share of observed high-price offers. High-price subjects generally kept their price inequality aversion at a strong level, as long as high-price offers were in the minority; otherwise, their price inequality aversion weakened fast as the share of high-price offers increased. We additionally present field evidence, showing that market gatekeepers can exploit by delicately displaying the prices of homogeneous goods to consumers.
“Organized charity and consumer sympathy in the influencer economy”
Sirui Li 