Benjamin Shiller

Brandeis University · Department of Economics

Since its founding, Amazon has established a reputation for being consumer friendly by consistently offering low prices. However, recent antitrust concerns about dominant online platforms have revived questions about whether Amazon uses its market share to exploit consumers. Using the sudden U.S. exit of Toys R Us as a natural experiment, we find t...

A consumer's web‐browsing history, now readily available, may be much more useful than demographics for both targeting advertisements and personalizing prices. Using a method that combines economic modeling and machine learning methods, I find a striking difference. Personalizing prices based on web‐browsing histories increases profits by 12.99 per...

Ad blocking software allows Internet users to obtain information without generating ad revenue for site owners, potentially undermining investments in content. We explore the impact of site-level ad blocker usage on website quality, as inferred from traffic. We find that each additional percentage point of site visitors blocking ads reduces its tra...

Person-specific pricing had until recently rarely been observed. The reason, that reservation values were unobtainable, may no longer be true now that massive datasets tracking detailed individual behavior exist. Hence, a fundamental change in the way goods are priced may be underway. I investigate this claim in one context. I show demographics, wh...

An existing theoretical literature finds that frictionless resale markets cannot reduce profits of monopolist producers of perfectly durable goods. This paper starts by presenting logical arguments suggesting this finding does not hold for goods consumers tire of with use, implying the impact of resale is an empirical question. The empirical impact...

Bundling can increase revenue and profits relative to selling products on a standalone basis, and this is an especially attractive strategy for zero-marginal-cost information products. Despite the clear benefits of bundling, it has one major problem: bundling produces revenue that is not readily attributable to particular pieces of intellectual pro...

This piece is comprised of three smaller chapters focusing on separate questions. In the first, I ask whether shutting down resale markets by selling digital goods or by streaming digital content (renting) impacts firm profits. I use a two-period two-type model to determine the range of possible impacts of each distribution strategy. I then estimat...

Economists have well-developed theories that challenge the wisdom of the common practice of uniform pricing. With digital music as its context, this paper explores the profit and welfare implications of various alternatives, including song-specific pricing, various forms of bundling, two-part tariffs, nonlinear pricing, and third-degree price discr...