Dual Learning: How and How Much Can Platforms Learn from Searching Consumers?

Consumers search on a platform to find a product they like. The platform observes which products consumers inspect and buy. Based on these observations it ranks products to maximally learn, in the long term, which product consumers like. We find that a monopoly platform first experiments with rankings and later only ranks products that early consumers bought. This guarantees that later consumers are pickier, helping the platform to learn what consumers really like. The more dissimilar consumer tastes, the more consumers search themselves and the platform learns about products. Competition restricts what platforms learn.