Related papers: How to sell an app: pay-per-play or buy-it-now?

We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…

We study the problem of selling a resource through an auction mechanism. The winning buyer in turn develops this resource to generate profit. Two forms of payment are considered: charging the winning buyer a one-time payment, or an initial…

We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…

Mobile gaming is a rapidly growing and incredibly profitable sector; having grown seven-fold over the past 10 years, it now grosses over $100 billion annually. This growth was due in large part to a shift in monetization strategies: rather…

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…

Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows firms to better tailor products to consumers' tastes, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about consumers that can be…

We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework, where a seller not only sets product price but also designs flexible 'advertising schemes' to influence customers' valuation of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the…

In the Learning to Price setting, a seller posts prices over time with the goal of maximizing revenue while learning the buyer's valuation. This problem is very well understood when values are stationary (fixed or iid). Here we study the…

Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…

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,…

Traditional user profiling techniques rely on browsing history or purchase records to identify users' willingness to pay. This enables sellers to offer personalized prices to profiled users while charging only a uniform price to…

In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by…

We study the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller…

In a digital age where companies face rapid changes in technology, consumer trends, and business environments, there is a critical need for continual revision of the business model in response to disruptive innovation. A pillar of…

We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…

A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…

As game companies increasingly embrace a service-oriented business model, the need for predictive models of players becomes more pressing. Multiple activities, such as user acquisition, live game operations or game design need to be…

A buyer and a seller bargain over the price of an object. Both players can build reputations for being obstinate by offering the same price over time. Before players bargain, the seller decides whether to adopt a new technology that can…

It is well-known that selling different goods in a single bundle can significantly increase revenue. However, bundling is no longer profitable if the goods have high production costs. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new…

We consider "time-of-use" pricing as a technique for matching supply and demand of temporal resources with the goal of maximizing social welfare. Relevant examples include energy, computing resources on a cloud computing platform, and…