Wenji Xu
Wenji Xu
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics and Finance, City University of Hong Kong.
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2020.
My research is on economic theory and industrial organization.
Email: wenjixu@cityu.edu.hk
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Working Papers
Working Papers
An intermediary serves as a platform through which a producer with a private cost sells a product to a unit mass of consumers. The intermediary has information about the match values between consumers and the product, which can be used to inform both the consumers and the producer. This paper studies the revenue-maximizing mechanisms for the intermediary under two critical business models: the retail model and the marketplace model. We show that the market outcomes are equivalent across the two business models. Furthermore, it is optimal for the intermediary to either (i) provide upper-censored partial information to consumers and no information to the producer, or (ii) fully inform consumers about their values and partially disclose that information to the producer and induce quasi-perfect price discrimination. This result suggests that product recommendation and price discrimination are outcome-equivalent mechanisms for an intermediary.
This paper studies sequential social learning, in which agents learn about an underlying state from others' actions. In contrast to the classic models with a network observational structure, agents arrive in cohorts and observe action-signals regarding previous cohorts' actions. We identify a simple, necessary, and sufficient condition for asymptotic learning, called separability, a joint property of action-signals and agents' private information about the state. A necessary condition for separability is "unbounded beliefs" which requires agents' private information to generate strong evidence of the true state, even if the probability of such evidence is small. With unbounded beliefs, separability is satisfied if action-signals have double thresholds so that, at a minimum, they reveal whether agents above a threshold number in each cohort choose actions below a choice-threshold. Without double thresholds, learning can be confounded so that agents always choose different actions with positive probabilities and never reach a consensus.
Consumer-Minded Informational Intermediary and Welfare Losses (Online Appendix). with Kai Hao Yang
Accepted at RAND Journal of Economics
This paper examines the welfare implications of third-party informational intermediation. A seller sets the price of a product that is sold through an intermediary, who discloses information about the product to consumers. In a model where the intermediary is consumer-minded---has a payoff that depends on both the seller's revenue and the consumer surplus, we show that total welfare may decrease in the Pareto sense, as the intermediary's consumer-mindedness increases. Furthermore, we show that consumer-mindedness emerges endogenously when a revenue-maximizing intermediary is forward-looking and the consumer base is increasing in past consumer surplus.
Dynamic Pricing with Recommendation and Consumer Feedback (Online Appendix). with Shuoguang Yang.
R&R at RAND Journal of Economics
A long-lived seller sells a new product of unknown value by offering prices and recommendations to short-lived consumers in continuous time. The seller receives consumer feedback about the product at a rate that increases with the instantaneous sales volume. The optimal selling mechanism features episodes of price discounts, during which the seller discontinuously lowers the price and offers unwarranted recommendations to consumers. The optimal pricing strategy depends on the nature of consumer feedback and may involve early or late discounts, dynamic price backtracking, and below-cost pricing.
This paper studies the pricing of transportation services and the associated welfare implications. We develop a theoretical model to analyze two-part pricing by transportation service providers who face the backhaul problem and heterogeneous demands within and across regions. The model generates asymmetric transportation prices between regions and predicts that reductions in shipping costs lead to attenuated and unequal welfare gains. Using newly collected data from the largest platform for Chinese e-commerce delivery firms, we quantify the model and find that a universal 10% reduction in shipping costs leads the marginal delivery price to drop by 2.35%, the fixed fee to increase by 0.82%, delivery firms’ profit to increase by 1.17%, and e-commerce sellers’ welfare to rise by 0.36%, on average, with sellers in eastern and coastal cities gaining more than those in western and hinterland cities.
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