Chapter One is based on my paper “Sequential Screening Meets Last-minute Sales.” This paper incorporates last-minute sales into a two-period sequential screening model. Early buyers privately observe an imperfect signal regarding their valuation in period one, and then privately observe their valuation in period two. Last-minute buyers arrive in period two and already know their valuation. In the seller’s optimal mechanism with full commitment, early buyers likely to have high valuations are separated by different refund contracts and early buyers likely to have low valuations are pooled by a full-refund contract. We also discuss the seller’s optimal mechanism when she cannot commit to the period-two contract at the beginning. In this case, the “interval early buyers” are delay...[ Read more ]

Chapter One is based on my paper “Sequential Screening Meets Last-minute Sales.” This paper incorporates last-minute sales into a two-period sequential screening model. Early buyers privately observe an imperfect signal regarding their valuation in period one, and then privately observe their valuation in period two. Last-minute buyers arrive in period two and already know their valuation. In the seller’s optimal mechanism with full commitment, early buyers likely to have high valuations are separated by different refund contracts and early buyers likely to have low valuations are pooled by a full-refund contract. We also discuss the seller’s optimal mechanism when she cannot commit to the period-two contract at the beginning. In this case, the “interval early buyers” are delayed to last-minute sales in order to discourage price cutting in period two. The seller can implement that by offering low-price guarantees to the delayed buyers. Our findings shed new light on the seller’s revenue management in dynamic environments.

Chapter Two is based on my paper “Delegation with Unawareness” with Xiaojian Zhao. We incorporate unawareness into the delegation problem between a financial expert and an investor, and study their pre-delegation communication. The expert has superior awareness of the possible states of the world, and decides whether to reveal some of them to the investor. We find that the expert reveals all the possible states to the investor if the investor is initially aware of a large set of possible states, but only reveals partially or nothing otherwise. An investor of higher degree of unawareness tends to delegate a larger set of projects to the expert, giving rise to a higher incentive for the expert to keep her unaware.