This week's Theory Seminar features Nima Haghpanah of Penn State University discussing Selling to a Group (with Aditya Kuvalekar and Elliot Lipnowski). Haghpanah is an assistant professor of Economics at Penn State.

He studies mechanism design, information design, and price discrimination.

 

The Zoom link can be accessed here

 

Abstract

A group of agents can collectively purchase a public good that yields heterogeneous benefits to its members. Combining a reduced-form implementation result with a duality argument, we characterize the seller’s profitmaximizing mechanism. Trade outcomes depend solely on a weighted average of the agents’ virtual values, with endogenous voting weights. Heterogeneity in voting weights reflects heterogeneity in agents’ value distributions, where agents with lower value distributions are given more weight in trade decisions. Simple pricing rules are generally not (even approximately) optimal.