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Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…
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…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
We analyze a principal-agent procurement problem in which the principal (she) is unaware some of the marginal cost types of the agent (he). Communication arises naturally as some types of the agent may have an incentive to raise the…
Many online marketplaces personalize prices based on consumer attributes. Since these prices are private, consumers may be unaware that they have spent more on a good than the lowest possible price, and cannot easily take action to pay…
Many smart grid frameworks, such as demand response programs, require accurate information about consumers' parameters (e.g., flexibility) at the aggregator side to optimize grid operations. Existing works typically rely on perfect…
This paper studies the incentives of the seller and buyers to shill bid in a single-item auction. An auction is seller identity-compatible if the seller cannot profit from pretending to be one or more bidders via fake identities. It is…
We consider a package assignment problem with multiple units of indivisible items. The seller can specify preferences over partitions of their supply between buyers as packaging costs. We propose incremental costs together with a graph that…
Posted price mechanisms are prevalent in allocating goods within online marketplaces due to their simplicity and practical efficiency. We explore a fundamental scenario where buyers' valuations are independent and identically distributed,…
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…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
We consider online procurement auctions, where the agents arrive sequentially, in random order, and have private costs for their services. The buyer aims to maximize a monotone submodular value function for the subset of agents whose…
We study the problem of designing posted-price mechanisms in order to sell a single unit of a single item within a finite period of time. Motivated by real-world problems, such as, e.g., long-term rental of rooms and apartments, we assume…
Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…
In online marketplaces like Airbnb, users frequently engage in comparison shopping before making purchase decisions. Despite the prevalence of this behavior, a significant disconnect persists between mainstream e-commerce search engines and…
I study a model of advisors with hidden motives: a seller discloses information about an object's value to a potential buyer, who doesn't know the object's value or how profitable the object's sale is to the seller (the seller's motives). I…
Principal components analysis (PCA) is a standard tool for identifying good low-dimensional approximations to data in high dimension. Many data sets of interest contain private or sensitive information about individuals. Algorithms which…
We consider dynamic pricing schemes in online settings where selfish agents generate online events. Previous work on online mechanisms has dealt almost entirely with the goal of maximizing social welfare or revenue in an auction settings.…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
Shill bidding occurs when fake bids are introduced into an auction on the seller's behalf in order to artificially inflate the final price. This is typically achieved by the seller having friends bid in her auctions, or the seller controls…