Dmitry Shapiro

This paper investigates the role of discount travel agencies such as Priceline and Hotwire in the market segmentation of the hotel and airline industries. These agencies conceal important characteristics of the offered services, such as hotel locations or flight schedules. We explicitly model this opaque feature and show that it enables service providers to price discriminate between those customers who are sensitive to service characteristics and those who are not. Service providers can profit

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of strategic momentum and psychological momentum in best-of-three contests between players with unequal skills. As a theoretical benchmark, we develop a fully rational model of best-of-three contests and define psychological momentum as systematic deviation from the theoretical equilibrium. An empirical analysis of 66,262 professional tennis matches from 2002 to 2020 shows that our theoretical model closely matches first set outcomes, which is when

In this paper, I study profitability of the name-your-own-price channel (NYOP) in the presence of risk-averse buyers. First, I provide conditions that guarantee that for the monopolistic seller the NYOP is more profitable than the posted price. Second, I consider a more competitive framework where buyers with rejected bids have access to an alternative option. I show that if under the posted-price scenario there are unserved customers with low valuations, then NYOP is more profitable than the po

We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of set-level strategic and psychological momentums in a sample of 8,193 ATP best-of-five-set tennis matches where players have asymmetric abilities. Theoretical predictions match observed Set 1 outcomes, the only set with no set-level psychological momentum, but do not match any other sets. We find evidence of psychological reversal: in every set following a non-tie net score, the winner of the previous set underperforms compared to theoretical pre

Abstract We focus on mutual fund characteristics associated with periods of extreme performance. We find that funds with either positive (hot‐hand) or negative (icy‐hand) persistence tend to have portfolio similarities consistent with riskier positions: compared to no‐streak funds, they hold fewer stocks, invest more in top ten holdings, and have a higher portfolio beta. Also both hot‐hand and icy‐hand funds have significantly higher asset turnover than benchmark funds. Icy‐hand funds tend to be

Abstract The paper studies incentives of low‐quality sellers to disclose negative information about their products. We develop a model in which one's quality can be communicated via cheap‐talk messages only. This setting limits the ability of high‐quality sellers to separate, as any communication strategy they pursue can be costlessly imitated by low‐quality sellers. We study two factors that can incentivize low‐quality sellers to communicate their quality: buyers' loss aversion and competition.

We study how the predictive power of level-k models changes as we perturb the classical beauty contest setting along two dimensions: the strength of the coordination motive and the information symmetry. We use the Morris and Shin (2002) model as the unified framework for our study, and find that the predictive power of level-k models varies considerably along these two dimensions. Level-k models are successful in predicting subject behavior in settings with symmetric information and a strong coo