Related papers: Diversity of preferences can increase collective w…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
An important benefit of multi-objective search is that it maintains a diverse population of candidates, which helps in deceptive problems in particular. Not all diversity is useful, however: candidates that optimize only one objective while…
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…
Recommender systems recommend objects regardless of potential adverse effects of their overcrowding. We address this shortcoming by introducing crowd-avoiding recommendation where each object can be shared by only a limited number of users…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We study staged entry with costly gatekeeping in a differentiated-products economy: entrepreneurs observe noisy signals before paying a resource-intensive activation cost. Precision improves selection but requires more resources, reducing…
We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…
Recommender systems daily influence our decisions on the Internet. While considerable attention has been given to issues such as recommendation accuracy and user privacy, the long-term mutual feedback between a recommender system and the…
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…
Re-ranking is a process of rearranging ranking list to more effectively meet user demands by accounting for the interrelationships between items. Existing methods predominantly enhance the precision of search results, often at the expense…
In Web retrieval, there are many cases of competition between authors of Web documents: their incentive is to have their documents highly ranked for queries of interest. As such, the Web is a prominent example of a competitive search…
Exploitation universally emerges in various decision-making contexts, e.g., animals foraging, web surfing, the evolution of scientists' research topics, and our daily lives. Despite its ubiquity, exploitation, which refers to the behavior…
Users increasingly face multiple interface features on one hand, and constraints on available resources (e.g., time, attention) on the other. Understanding the sensitivity of users' well-being to feature type and resource constraints, is…
Finding a product online can be a challenging task for users. Faceted search interfaces, often in combination with recommenders, can support users in finding a product that fits their preferences. However, those preferences are not always…
We study the welfare effects of overreaction to information in the form of diagnostic expectations in markets with asymmetric information, and the effect of a simple intervention in the form of a tax or a subsidy. A large enough level of…
This paper presents the Sequential Rationality Hypothesis, which argues that consumers are better able to make utility-maximizing decisions when products appear in sequential pairwise comparisons rather than in simultaneous multi-option…
An individually costly act that benefits all group members is a public good. Natural selection favors individual contribution to public goods only when some benefit to the individual offsets the cost of contribution. Problems of sex ratio,…
In this paper, we study collaborative filtering in an interactive setting, in which the recommender agents iterate between making recommendations and updating the user profile based on the interactive feedback. The most challenging problem…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…