Aurélien Salas

Research

Job Market Paper

• Price Discrimination with Endogenous Participation
  Paper

  Abstract: To what extent should platforms enable price discrimination by sellers when buyers can vote with their feet? I assume that buyers are endowed with an outside option and receive a signal about their value before they decide whether to enter the platform or not. For the platform, endogenous participation creates a trade-off between surplus extraction and participation. It also imposes a constraint: when participation increases with valuations, the segmentations that deliver the highest buyer surplus under full participation cannot be implemented. I characterize the feasible welfare frontier and derive the platform’s optimal segmentation under three alternative assumptions about buyer information. Overall, while endogenous participation can push platforms to give more surplus to buyers, it can also limit their ability to implement the most buyer-friendly segmentations.

Publications

• Strategic Information Disclosure to Classification Algorithms: An Experiment Forthcoming Experimental Economics
  with Jeanne Hagenbach
  Paper Online Appendix

  Abstract: We experimentally study how individuals strategically disclose multidimensional information to a Naive Bayes algorithm trained to guess their characteristics. Subjects' objective is to minimize the algorithm's accuracy in guessing a target characteristic. We vary what participants know about the algorithm's functioning and how obvious are the correlations between the target and other characteristics. Optimal disclosure strategies rely on subjects identifying whether the combination of their characteristics is common or not. Information about the algorithm functioning makes subjects identify correlations they otherwise do not see but also overthink. Overall, this information decreases the frequency of optimal disclosure strategies.

Work in Progress

Disclosing Proxies
with Paula Onuchic