Related papers: Optimal Mechanisms for Selling Information
Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and…
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…
Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…
We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her…
Sellers in online markets face the challenge of determining the right time to sell in view of uncertain future offers. Classical stopping theory assumes that sellers have full knowledge of the value distributions, and leverage this…
We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…
Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…