Related papers: Diversity of preferences can increase collective w…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
Social choice functions help aggregate individual preferences while differentially private mechanisms provide formal privacy guarantees to release answers of queries operating on sensitive data. However, preserving differential privacy…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
Explore-and-exploit tradeoffs play a key role in recommendation systems (RSs), aiming at serving users better by learning from previous interactions. Despite their commercial success, the societal effects of explore-and-exploit mechanisms…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
We design mechanisms for maintaining public goods which require periodic in-kind contributions, motivated by incentives problems facing crowd-sourced recommender systems. Utilitarian welfare is maximized by redistributive policies which are…
Population diversity is crucial in evolutionary algorithms to enable global exploration and to avoid poor performance due to premature convergence. This book chapter reviews runtime analyses that have shown benefits of population diversity,…
Keeping up with "The Joneses" matters. This paper examines a model of reference dependent choice where reference points are determined by social comparisons. An increase in the strength of social comparisons, even by only a few agents,…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
How evolution favors cooperation is a fundamental issue in social and economic systems. In the business world, actively selecting a suitable project is usually helpful for a businessman to be in an advantageous position. By incorporating…
It has become increasingly clear that recommender systems that overly focus on short-term engagement prevents users from exploring diverse interests, ultimately hurting long-term user experience. To tackle this challenge, numerous…
We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
This paper investigates the value of recommendations for disseminating economic information, with a focus on frictions resulting from preference heterogeneity. We consider Bayesian expected-payoff maximizers who receive non-strategic…
Large-scale online recommendation systems must facilitate the allocation of a limited number of items among competing users while learning their preferences from user feedback. As a principled way of incorporating market constraints and…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…