Related papers: Value of Targeting
When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…
We consider the problem of maximizing portfolio value when an agent has a subjective view on asset value which differs from the traded market price. The agent's trades will have a price impact which affect the price at which the asset is…
Reviews of official statistics for UK housing have noted that developments have not kept pace with real-world change, particularly the rapid growth of private renting. This paper examines the potential value of big data in this context. We…
While page views are often sold instantly through real-time auctions when users visit websites, they can also be sold in advance via guaranteed contracts. In this paper, we present a dynamic programming model to study how an online…
Many internet ventures rely on advertising for their revenue. However, users feel discontent by the presence of ads on the websites they visit, as the data-size of ads is often comparable to that of the actual content. This has an impact…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
This paper argues that data of strategic individuals with heterogeneous privacy valuations in a distributed online social network (e.g., Facebook) will be under-priced, if traded in a monopoly buyer setting, and will lead to diminishing…
The ongoing debate over net neutrality covers a broad set of issues related to the regulation of public networks. In two ways, we extend an idealized usage-priced game-theoretic framework based on a common linear demand-response model.…
We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
Companies like Google and Microsoft run billions of auctions every day to sell advertising opportunities. Any change to the rules of these auctions can have a tremendous effect on the revenue of the company and the welfare of the…
The 2002 Trading Agent Competition (TAC) presented a challenging market game in the domain of travel shopping. One of the pivotal issues in this domain is uncertainty about hotel prices, which have a significant influence on the relative…
In this paper, we initiate the study of the multiplicative bidding language adopted by major Internet search companies. In multiplicative bidding, the effective bid on a particular search auction is the product of a base bid and bid…
Browsing privacy solutions face an uphill battle to deployment. Many operate counter to the economic objectives of popular online services (e.g., by completely blocking ads) and do not provide enough incentive for users who may be subject…
Recent attempts to achieve fairness in predictive models focus on the balance between fairness and accuracy. In sensitive applications such as healthcare or criminal justice, this trade-off is often undesirable as any increase in prediction…
In programmatic advertising, ad slots are usually sold using second-price (SP) auctions in real-time. The highest bidding advertiser wins but pays only the second-highest bid (known as the winning price). In SP, for a single item, the…
Machine learning is increasingly used in the most diverse applications and domains, whether in healthcare, to predict pathologies, or in the financial sector to detect fraud. One of the linchpins for efficiency and accuracy in machine…
Displaying banner advertisements (in short, ads) on webpages has usually been discussed as an Internet economics topic where a publisher uses auction models to sell an online user's page view to advertisers and the one with the highest bid…
We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…