Related papers: Pricing Social Goods
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
In this paper, we analyse how a peer-to-peer sharing platform should price its service (when imagined as an excludable public good) to maximize profit, when each user's participation adds value to the platform service by creating a positive…
If you recommend a product to me and I buy it, how much should you be paid by the seller? And if your sole interest is to maximize the amount paid to you by the seller for a sequence of recommendations, how should you recommend optimally if…
We study the social efficiency of bilateral trade between a seller and a buyer. In the classical Bayesian setting, the celebrated Myerson-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem states that no Bayesian incentive-compatible, individually…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
Algorithmic pricing is the computational problem that sellers (e.g., in supermarkets) face when trying to set prices for their items to maximize their profit in the presence of a known demand. Guruswami et al. (2005) propose this problem…
We consider a platform facilitating trade between sellers and buyers with the objective of maximizing consumer surplus. Even though in many such marketplaces prices are set by revenue-maximizing sellers, platforms can influence prices…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
We consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
In markets where algorithmic data processing is increasingly prevalent, recommendation algorithms can substantially affect trade and welfare. We consider a setting in which an algorithm recommends a product based on its value to the buyer…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
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.…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
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 auctions whose bidders are embedded in a social or economic network. As a result, even bidders who do not win the auction themselves might derive utility from the auction, namely, when a friend wins. On the other hand, when an…
Social commerce platforms are emerging businesses where producers sell products through re-sellers who advertise the products to other customers in their social network. Due to the increasing popularity of this business model, thousands of…
When launching new products, firms face uncertainty about market reception. Online reviews provide valuable information not only to consumers but also to firms, allowing firms to adjust the product characteristics, including its selling…
We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…
This paper studies a sale promotion mechanism design problem on a social network, where a node (a seller) sells one item to the other nodes on the network to maximize her revenue. However, the seller does not know other nodes except for her…