Related papers: Value of Targeting
Information in the form of data, which can be stored and transferred between users, can be viewed as an intangible commodity, which can be traded in exchange for money. Determining the fair price at which a string of data should be traded…
Firms collect vast amounts of behavioral and geographical data on individuals. While behavioral data captures an individual's digital footprint, geographical data reflects their physical footprint. Given the significant privacy risks…
As machine learning (ML) is deployed by many competing service providers, the underlying ML predictors also compete against each other, and it is increasingly important to understand the impacts and biases from such competition. In this…
Despite the clear performance benefits of data augmentations, little is known about why they are so effective. In this paper, we disentangle several key mechanisms through which data augmentations operate. Establishing an exchange rate…
We initiate the study of an interesting aspect of sponsored search advertising, namely the consequences of broad match-a feature where an ad of an advertiser can be mapped to a broader range of relevant queries, and not necessarily to the…
We consider a scenario in which a database stores sensitive data of users and an analyst wants to estimate statistics of the data. The users may suffer a cost when their data are used in which case they should be compensated. The analyst…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
The design of data markets has gained importance as firms increasingly use machine learning models fueled by externally acquired training data. A key consideration is the externalities firms face when data, though inherently freely…
How does targeted advertising influence electoral outcomes? This paper presents a one-dimensional spatial model of voting in which a privately informed challenger persuades voters to support him over the status quo. I show that targeted…
We examine trade-offs among stakeholders in ad auctions. Our metrics are the revenue for the utility of the auctioneer, the number of clicks for the utility of the users and the welfare for the utility of the advertisers. We show how to…
With the proliferation of the digital data economy, digital data is considered as the crude oil in the twenty-first century, and its value is increasing. Keeping pace with this trend, the model of data market trading between data providers…
In social learning environments, agents acquire information from both private signals and the observed actions of predecessors, referred to as history. We define the value of history as the gain in expected payoff from accessing both the…
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…
This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…
We consider a scenario where a seller possesses a dataset $D$ and trains it into models of varying accuracies for sale in the market. Due to the reproducibility of data, the dataset can be reused to train models with different accuracies,…
Managers often believe that collecting more data will continually improve the accuracy of their machine learning models. However, we argue in this paper that when data lose relevance over time, it may be optimal to collect a limited amount…
Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information- and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while…
Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number…
How much value does a dataset or a data production process have to an agent who wishes to use the data to assist decision-making? This is a fundamental question towards understanding the value of data as well as further pricing of data.…
Data is fundamental to machine learning-based products and services and is considered strategic due to its externalities for businesses, governments, non-profits, and more generally for society. It is renowned that the value of…