Research
Published Articles
Yang, Jianxia, Eric Schmidbauer and Lan Zhang (2023). ``Partial Cross Ownership, Exclusive Contracting, and Market Entry,'' Economics Letters, 226, 111048.
Arnold, Michael, Eric Schmidbauer and Lan Zhang (2022). "Uniform and targeted informative advertising with asymmetric customer loyalty," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 31(1), 90-114.
Ashoori, Minoo, Eric Schmidbauer, and Axel Stock (2020). "Availability as a Signal for Quality in a Market with Word-of-Mouth Communication," Review of Marketing Science, 18(1), 99-115.
Lubensky, Dmitry and Eric Schmidbauer (2020). "Free Product Trials: Disclosing Quality and Match Value," Economic Inquiry, 58(4), 1565-1576. Presentation slides.
Schmidbauer, Eric (2019). "Budget Selection when Agents Compete," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 158: 255-68. Presentation slides.
Schmidbauer, Eric and Axel Stock (2018). "Quality Signaling via Strikethrough Prices," International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(3), 524-532.
Lubensky, Dmity and Eric Schmidbauer (2018). "Equilibrium Informativeness in Veto Games," Games and Economic Behavior, 109, 104-125. Older working paper version with treatment of the full parameter range (referenced in footnote 8). Presentation slides.
Schmidbauer, Eric and Dmitry Lubensky (2018). "New and Improved?", International Journal of Industrial Organization, 56C, 26-48. Presentation slides.
Schmidbauer, Eric (2017). "Multi-period competitive cheap talk with highly biased experts," Games and Economic Behavior, 102, 240-254. Presentation slides.
Working Papers
"Would I Lie to You? Project selection with biased advice" (with John Hamman and Miguel Martinez-Carrasco).
When agents with private information compete for resources from an uninformed decision-maker and are biased towards their own favored projects (e.g., a CEO decides which division manager’s project to fund), they have incentive to strategically communicate about their project's value. However, possible future interaction can mitigate this problem even without reputational concerns, since an agent who induces acceptance of a low-valued project today consumes resources that crowd out better opportunities that may arrive in the future. We study this organizational environment both theoretically and empirically using laboratory experiments. We hypothesize and find that truth telling is easier to support as low-quality projects lose value or become more likely to occur, but harder to support as agent competition grows. We see an interesting behavioral result in which beliefs influence responsiveness to parameter changes. Specifically, as agents grow more pessimistic about the likelihood of truthful reporting by their competitors, they respond more sharply to parameter changes, in line with the model's predictions.
Works in Progress
"The use of buyer 'love letters' in residential real estate markets".
"Time on the market and list prices in 'hot' real estate markets" (with Dmitry Lubensky).
"The 15% pledge: Does it help minority owned suppliers?" (with Axel Stock).
"When should firms promote learning? An experimental study" (with Brock Stoddard and Lan Zhang).
Painfully condensed summary of each of my published papers
Partial Cross Ownership, Exclusive Contracting, and Market Entry: offering partial cross ownership to an incumbent can thwart its ability to exclude an entrant through exclusive contracting.
Uniform and targeted informative advertising...: pricing and advertising strategies interact in interesting ways with the size of different market segments.
Availability as a Signal for Quality...: word-of-mouth effects and consumers' desire for exclusive consumption experiences affect the firm's optimal signaling strategy.
Free product trials: free trials cause more favorable beliefs about quality but give consumers private information about their match value, so sometimes firms won't allow them.
Budget selection when agents compete: A bloated budget is rational because it reduces competition between selfish experts thereby inducing more truth-telling.
Quality signaling via strikethrough prices: A low price now is bad news about quality unless the firm can prove it was able to charge a high price before.
Equilibrium informativeness in veto games: When an expert gives take-it-or-leave-it advice that also restricts your choices, lots of things can happen but you’re probably better off than if your choices were unrestricted.
New and improved: Because it’s expensive to make and sell new products, if the firm bothered to release them they usually are improved over their predecessors.
Multi-period competitive cheap talk: When selfish experts compete and are forward looking they won’t act completely selfish.