Welcome to my webpage!
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim and a member of Project B05 in the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 224.
My research interests are Digital Economics and Industrial Organization.
I will be on the academic job market in 2026-27.
You can find my CV here.
If you want to get in touch, send me an email: pwegener@mail.uni-mannheim.de
Abstract: I consider a single-product monopoly in which consumers can verifiably disclose demand-relevant information to the firm, enabling personalized pricing. I show that consent decisions reveal information about consumers who opt out and thereby raise the price they face. This effect arises because consumers disclose only when the benefit from a lower personalized price exceeds their exogenous privacy cost: by leaving the non-disclosure pool, those consumers induce the firm to increase the price for those who do not consent. The equilibrium is inefficient from a consumer welfare perspective because some consumers disclose even though their individual benefit is smaller than the externality they impose. Policies that reduce consumers’ privacy costs benefit disclosing consumers directly but can reduce consumer surplus by encouraging disclosure and raising the price faced by those who opt out.
Abstract: We study pricing and product design choices in a duopoly model of directed search. Product design determines both the expected valuation and the dispersion of consumers’ match values. While greater dispersion increases the option value of search, it also increases expected search duration. Consumers with lower search costs therefore benefit more from products with high dispersion than consumers with higher search costs. When firms choose product designs with different levels of dispersion, consumers sort by search cost in their initial search decisions. Firms thereby gain prominence for different consumer segments, which softens price competition. We show that, in equilibrium, firms choose maximum differentiation.
Abstract: Advertisers place ads on publishers’ websites to attract the attention of multihoming consumers. Because of competition in the product market, advertisers may have an incentive to partially or fully foreclose their rivals. A gatekeeper may be able to limit publishers’ access to some of the consumers. We fully characterize the equilibrium in which the gatekeeper, publishers, and advertisers make strategic pricing decisions. We show how the presence of the gatekeeper affects the advertisers’ foreclosure decisions and the surplus of the different market participants.
Teaching Assistant, MSc, University of Mannheim — Spring 2024, 2025, and 2026
Teaching Assistant, BSc, University of Bonn — Spring 2019; award for excellent tutoring.