Working Papers
Welfare Consequences of Upgrades: Evidence from the Airline Industry (RR, JEEA)
Using upgrades - fees that customers pay to access a premium quality product after the purchase of a regular one - can significantly affect consumer welfare. On the one hand, regular consumers benefit from potentially accessing the monopolist's higher-quality goods at a discounted price. On the other hand, the monopolist will seek to capture surplus from these gains from trade by offering a different price menu for all goods. Whether consumer welfare will rise or fall when a firm introduces upgrades will depend on the relative magnitudes of these two effects. The aim of this research is to disentangle these two effects in the context of an international airline that gives economy class passengers the option to pay an additional fee to upgrade to business class. I develop and estimate a model of airline pricing in order to assess the effects of upgrades via counterfactual simulations. I show that the upgrade option improves the allocation of passengers among cabins over time and increases consumer and producer welfare by 1.4% and 2.2% respectively.
(Selected for) Presentations: UCLA proseminar, 2024 INFORMS RMP (2024), 2024 EEARIE 2024, PROSPER Seminars, Università degli Studi di Siena, 2024 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, NHH, Liverpool School of Business, Università Ca' Foscari, Nova School of Business and Economics, Bocconi University, EMAC, 2025 INFORMS (Marketing Science Conference)
Work in Progress
Impact of in-session price increases in the cart on consumer behavior: Evidence from an online marketplace (joint work with Serkan Mehder, Ovunc Yilmaz, Jiankun Sun, and Zifeng Zhao)
Within-session price increases - posted-price changes for items already in a consumer's cart - are increasingly common on retail, travel, and ride-sharing platforms, yet their causal effect on consumer behavior is unstudied because in-session prices are typically endogenous to demand and inventory. We partner with a European online pharmaceutical marketplace whose multi-seller cart-allocation rule generates exogenous within-session price increases when consumers add items, and conduct three randomized field experiments that vary whether such increases are passed through or absorbed by the platform, holding underlying market prices fixed. Within-session price increases reduce conversion by 10 percentage points among first-time users and 6 percentage points among recurring users, with revenue per visitor falling by approximately €3 in both groups. Behaviorally, exposed users initially attempt to mitigate the increase - primarily by removing items - before abandoning shortly thereafter; most of the conversion gap emerges within five minutes. The effect rises sharply with the magnitude of the increase (negligible below €1, nearly 20 percentage points for €6-10 increases) and attenuates with cart value at exposure. A third experiment with sequential randomization shows that responses depend critically on the consumer's stage of commitment and prior exposure: introducing an increase after sign-up reduces conversion by 17 percentage points, while removing a previously assigned increase raises conversion by 6 percentage points. These findings imply a margin-conversion tradeoff and motivate causally informed absorption policies that condition on magnitude, cart value, and user history.
(Selected for) Presentations: 2025 INFORMS (Revenue Management and Pricing Conference 2025), ESADE Pricing Symposium, EWG Retail Operations Annual Meeting 2025, Eleventh Marketplace Innovation Workshop (MIW), Bocconi University (2025)
Flexibility and Revenue Management: Experimental evidence from an international airline (joint work with Sungtak Hong, and Jinglong Zhao)
The value of information: Evidence from the airline industry (joint work with William Burton, Daniel Fry, Adam Thorsteinson, Jason Wong)
(Selected for) Presentations: 2025 AGIFORS, 2025 SEA
Welfare Consequences of Upgrades: Evidence from the Airline Industry (RR, JEEA)
Using upgrades - fees that customers pay to access a premium quality product after the purchase of a regular one - can significantly affect consumer welfare. On the one hand, regular consumers benefit from potentially accessing the monopolist's higher-quality goods at a discounted price. On the other hand, the monopolist will seek to capture surplus from these gains from trade by offering a different price menu for all goods. Whether consumer welfare will rise or fall when a firm introduces upgrades will depend on the relative magnitudes of these two effects. The aim of this research is to disentangle these two effects in the context of an international airline that gives economy class passengers the option to pay an additional fee to upgrade to business class. I develop and estimate a model of airline pricing in order to assess the effects of upgrades via counterfactual simulations. I show that the upgrade option improves the allocation of passengers among cabins over time and increases consumer and producer welfare by 1.4% and 2.2% respectively.
(Selected for) Presentations: UCLA proseminar, 2024 INFORMS RMP (2024), 2024 EEARIE 2024, PROSPER Seminars, Università degli Studi di Siena, 2024 European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, NHH, Liverpool School of Business, Università Ca' Foscari, Nova School of Business and Economics, Bocconi University, EMAC, 2025 INFORMS (Marketing Science Conference)
Work in Progress
Impact of in-session price increases in the cart on consumer behavior: Evidence from an online marketplace (joint work with Serkan Mehder, Ovunc Yilmaz, Jiankun Sun, and Zifeng Zhao)
Within-session price increases - posted-price changes for items already in a consumer's cart - are increasingly common on retail, travel, and ride-sharing platforms, yet their causal effect on consumer behavior is unstudied because in-session prices are typically endogenous to demand and inventory. We partner with a European online pharmaceutical marketplace whose multi-seller cart-allocation rule generates exogenous within-session price increases when consumers add items, and conduct three randomized field experiments that vary whether such increases are passed through or absorbed by the platform, holding underlying market prices fixed. Within-session price increases reduce conversion by 10 percentage points among first-time users and 6 percentage points among recurring users, with revenue per visitor falling by approximately €3 in both groups. Behaviorally, exposed users initially attempt to mitigate the increase - primarily by removing items - before abandoning shortly thereafter; most of the conversion gap emerges within five minutes. The effect rises sharply with the magnitude of the increase (negligible below €1, nearly 20 percentage points for €6-10 increases) and attenuates with cart value at exposure. A third experiment with sequential randomization shows that responses depend critically on the consumer's stage of commitment and prior exposure: introducing an increase after sign-up reduces conversion by 17 percentage points, while removing a previously assigned increase raises conversion by 6 percentage points. These findings imply a margin-conversion tradeoff and motivate causally informed absorption policies that condition on magnitude, cart value, and user history.
(Selected for) Presentations: 2025 INFORMS (Revenue Management and Pricing Conference 2025), ESADE Pricing Symposium, EWG Retail Operations Annual Meeting 2025, Eleventh Marketplace Innovation Workshop (MIW), Bocconi University (2025)
Flexibility and Revenue Management: Experimental evidence from an international airline (joint work with Sungtak Hong, and Jinglong Zhao)
The value of information: Evidence from the airline industry (joint work with William Burton, Daniel Fry, Adam Thorsteinson, Jason Wong)
(Selected for) Presentations: 2025 AGIFORS, 2025 SEA
