Related papers: Monopoly pricing with buyer search
We consider the "Offline Ad Slot Scheduling" problem, where advertisers must be scheduled to "sponsored search" slots during a given period of time. Advertisers specify a budget constraint, as well as a maximum cost per click, and may not…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
Economic institutions often influence market outcomes not by directly controlling sellers' menus, but by shaping the market composition sellers face. We study the welfare effects of this upstream choice in a monopoly screening model. An…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
We consider the well known, and notoriously difficult, problem of a single revenue-maximizing seller selling two or more heterogeneous goods to a single buyer whose private values for the goods are drawn from a (possibly correlated) known…
We study the dynamic pricing problem faced by a monopolistic retailer who sells a storable product to forward-looking consumers. In this framework, the two major pricing policies (or mechanisms) studied in the literature are the…
In the quest for market mechanisms that are easy to implement, yet close to optimal, few seem as viable as posted pricing. Despite the growing body of impressive results, the performance of most posted price mechanisms however, rely…
In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…
Online markets are a part of everyday life, and their rules are governed by algorithms. Assuming participants are inherently self-interested, well designed rules can help to increase social welfare. Many algorithms for online markets are…
In many decision-making scenarios, individuals strategically choose what information to disclose to optimize their own outcomes. It is unclear whether such strategic information disclosure can lead to good societal outcomes. To address this…
Budget-management systems are one of the key components of modern auction markets. Internet advertising platforms typically offer advertisers the possibility to pace the rate at which their budget is depleted, through budget-pacing…
In this paper, we study the assortment optimization problem faced by many online retailers such as Amazon. We develop a \emph{cascade multinomial logit model}, based on the classic multinomial logit model, to capture the consumers'…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
We investigate a seller's revenue-maximizing mechanism in a setting where a desirable good is sold together with an undesirable bad (e.g., advertisements) that generates third-party revenue. The buyer's private information is…
This paper examines whether one can learn to play an optimal action while only knowing part of true specification of the environment. We choose the optimal pricing problem as our laboratory, where the monopolist is endowed with an…
Sponsored search mechanisms have drawn much attention from both academic community and industry in recent years since the seminal papers of [13] and [14]. However, most of the existing literature concentrates on the mechanism design and…
An information broker incentivizes consumers to share their information, while designing an information structure to shape the market segmentation. The information broker is a metaphor for an Internet platform that matches consumers with…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…