About

Aniko Öry is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Her role involves teaching and research within the faculty of the Tepper School, which emphasizes experiential learning and practical application in business education. Her contact email is aoery@andrew.cmu.edu, and she is based at the Tepper School located at 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. The Tepper School of Business focuses on leadership in business, technology, and analytics, with strategic initiatives guided by the vision to lead at the intersection of these fields.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Economics
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Economic growth
• Advertising
• Labour economics
• Demography
• Law
• Industrial organization
• Microeconomics
• Nursing
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Marketing
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Digital platforms 2.0: Emerging topics, opportunities, and challenges

  International Journal of Research in Marketing · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen access

  Digital platforms increasingly influence most online markets and ecosystems, creating substantial value for their customers, owners, and other partners. Yet, the challenges associated with platform operations, governance, and regulation continue to evolve. This paper aims to help researchers understand the extensive platform literature to facilitate effective academic contributions. First, we lay out emerging research topics and open questions related to platforms, both from an internal (platform design) and external (platform regulation) perspective. Then, we compare techniques for acquiring and using platform data, both with and without the collaboration of the platforms themselves, to facilitate empirical platform research. Our insights highlight the importance of multidisciplinary and multi-method approaches in studying digital platform policies, value chains and regulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic Price Competition with Capacity Constraints

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-07-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  We study dynamic price competition between sellers offering differentiated products with limited capacity and a common sales deadline.In every period, firms simultaneously set prices, and a randomly arriving buyer decides whether to purchase a product or leave the market.Given remaining capacities, firms trade off selling today against shifting demand to competitors to obtain future market power.We provide conditions for the existence and uniqueness of purestrategy Markov perfect equilibria.In the continuous-time limit, prices solve a system of ordinary differential equations.We derive properties of equilibrium dynamics and show that prices increase the most when the product with the lowest remaining capacity sells.Because firms do not fully internalize the social option value of future sales, equilibrium prices can be inefficiently low such that both firms and consumers would benefit if firms could commit to higher prices.We term this new welfare effect the Bertrand scarcity trap.

  PublisherDOI

• Aiming for the Goal: Contribution Dynamics of Crowdfunding

  American Economic Review · 2024 · 10 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  We study a dynamic contribution game where investors seek private benefits offered in exchange for contributions, and a single, publicly minded donor values project success. We show that donor contributions serve as costly signals that encourage socially productive contributions by investors who face a coordination problem. Investors and the donor prefer different equilibria, but all benefit in expectation from the donor’s ability to dynamically signal his valuation. We explore various contexts in which our model can be applied and delve empirically into the case of Kickstarter. We calibrate our model and quantify the coordination benefits of dynamic signaling in counterfactuals. (JEL C73, D26, D82, G32, L26, M13)

  PublisherDOI

• Mentoring and the Dynamics of Affirmative Action

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  We analyze the long-term workforce composition when the quality of mentoring available to majority and minority juniors depends on their representation in the workforce. A workforce with at least 50 percent majority workers invariably converges to one where the majority is overrepresented relative to the population. To maximize welfare, persistent interventions, such as group-specific fellowships, are often needed, and the optimal workforce may include minority workers of lower innate talent than the marginal majority worker. We discuss the role of mentorship determinants, talent dispersion, the scope of short-term interventions, various policy instruments and contrast our results to the classic fairness narrative. (JEL I20, J15, J16, J24)

  PublisherDOI

• Contracting with Word-of-Mouth Management

  Management Science · 2020 · 33 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Microeconomics

  We propose a model for word-of-mouth (WoM) management where a firm has two tools at hand: offering referral rewards and offering a free contract. Current customers’ incentives to engage in WoM can affect the contracting problem of a firm in the presence of positive externalities of users. Formally, we consider a classic Maskin–Riley contracting problem for the receiver of WoM where the firm can pay the senders referral rewards and a sender experiences positive externalities if the receiver adopts. A free contract can incentivize WoM because the higher adoption probability increases the expected externalities that the sender receives. We characterize the optimal incentive scheme and show when the two tools serve as substitutes and complements to each other depending on whether the market is niche and whether the product is social. We show that offering a free contract is optimal only if the fraction of premium users in the population is small, which is consistent with the observation that companies that successfully offer “freemium” contracts oftentimes have a high percentage of free users. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

  PublisherDOI

• The benefit of collective reputation

  The RAND Journal of Economics · 2019-09-16 · 24 citations

  article

  Abstract We study a model of reputation with two long‐lived firms who operate under a collective brand or as two individual brands. Firms' investments in quality are unobserved and can only be sustained through reputational concerns. In a collective brand, consumers cannot distinguish between the two firms. In the long run, this generates incentives to free‐ride on the other firm's investment, but in the short run, it mitigates the temptation to milk a good reputation. The signal structure and consumers' prior beliefs determine which effect dominates. We interpret our findings in light of the type of industry in which the firms operate.

  PublisherDOI

• Love Beauty and Planet

  Yale School of Management eBooks · 2019-01-01

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Transparency and distressed sales under asymmetric information

  Theoretical Economics · 2016-09-01 · 43 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  We analyze price transparency in a dynamic market with private information and interdependent values. Uninformed buyers compete inter- and intra-temporarily for a good sold by an informed seller suffering a liquidity shock. We contrast public versus private price offers. With two opportunities to trade, all equilibria with private offers have more trade than any equilibrium with public offers; under some additional conditions, we show Pareto dominance of the private-offers equilibria. If a failure to trade by the deadline results in an efficiency loss, public offers can induce a market breakdown before the deadline, while trade never stops with private offers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Consumers on a Leash: Advertised Sales and Intertemporal Price Discrimination

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2016-07-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  The Internet allows sellers to track "window shoppers, " consumers who look but do not buy, and to lure them back later by targeting them with an advertised sale. This new technology thus facilitates intertemporal price discrimination, but simultaneously makes it too easy for a seller to undercut her regular price. Because buyers know they could be lured back, the seller is forced to set a lower regular price. Advertising costs can, therefore, serve as a form of commitment: a seller can actually benefit from higher costs of advertising. Based on this framework, the impact of commitment on prices, profits, and welfare are analyzed using a dynamic pricing model. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how buyers� time preferences give rise to price fluctuation or an everyday-low-price in equilibrium.

  Publisher

• Transparency and Distressed Sales under Asymmetric Information

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2015-02-01 · 15 citations

  preprint

  We analyze a dynamic market with short lived adverse selection and correlated values. Uninformed buyers compete inter- and intra-temporarily for a good that is sold by an informed seller who is suffering a liquidity shock. We contrast a transparent (public price offers) with an opaque (private price offers) information structure. First, we show that all pure strategy equilibria with private offers must also be pure strategy equilibria with public offers. However, with private offers a pure strategy equilibrium is not sustainable if the seller is patient enough. Moreover, we can fully characterize the equilibrium in both information structures in a three period model if the buyers ’ valuations are a linear function of the seller’s costs and costs are uniformly distributed. Finally, we derive that in this setting, any equilibrium with private offers Pareto-dominates the unique pure strategy equilibrium with public offers. We provide a strong intuition for why these results extend to more general settings. 1

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• William Fuchs

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2 shared

• Joyee Deb

  New York University

  2 shared

• Andrzej Skrzypacz

  2 shared

• Yuhta Ishii

  Pennsylvania State University

  1 shared

• Zvika Neeman

  1 shared

• Michèle Müller-Itten

  University of Notre Dame

  1 shared

• Yuichiro Kamada

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Jungju Yu

  Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

  1 shared