Book Description

This thesis is comprised of three essays in the economics of information. In the first one we analyze the prac-tice of price discrimination from the prism of consumer-data driven market segmentation. We are particularly interested in the consumer-optimal segmentations, and in particular those that benefit poorer consumers the most. We show that once such distributive preferences are considered, optimal segmentations might not co-incide with consumer-optimal segmentations without distributive preferences. In particular, such "redistributive" segmentations might induce some extra profits to the firm. We also provide insights on the general shape of such redistributive segmentations. In the second chapter we study a persuasion problem in which the receiver is a "wishful thinker", meaning that he distorts his beliefs in the direct of more optimistic scenarios. We show how such bias impacts the effec-tiveness of information provision as a tool for inducing certain types of behavior, and illustrate our argument with three applications: information campaigns designed by health agencies, financial reports designed by a financial broker and political information in the context of elections.In the third chapter we study a persuasion problem in which the audience is composed of receivers who per-ceive the information being transmitted with varying degrees of refinement. We characterize the joint distribu-tion of beliefs that a sender can induce in the electorate in such a setting and show that the value that the sender can obtain through persuasion can be retrieved by process of recursive concavification of its indirect utility.