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As LLM agents advance, they are increasingly mediating economic decisions, ranging from product discovery to transactions, on behalf of users. Such applications promise benefits but also raise many questions about agent accountability and…
Recent research in industrial organisation has investigated the essential place that middlemen have in the networks that make up our global economy. In this paper we attempt to understand how such middlemen compete with each other through a…
Online labor markets give people in poor countries direct access to buyers in rich countries. Economic theory and empirical evidence strongly suggest that this kind of access improves human welfare. However, critics claim that abuses are…
Understanding and potentially predicting or even controlling urban labour markets represents a great challenge for workers and policy makers alike. Cities are effective engines of economic growth and prosperity and incubate complex dynamics…
This commentary explores how the platform economy shapes labour market responses during times of crisis, with a focus on gendered experiences. Drawing on cases of economic crisis, natural disasters, and refugee displacement, it examines how…
Information about peers' performance is pervasive in workplaces, yet its effects on worker behavior are mixed. We show that a key reason is that workers differ in how they value such information. In a real-effort experiment with 793…
Researchers have long proposed using economic approaches to resource allocation in computer systems. However, few of these proposals became operational, let alone commercial. Questions persist about the economic approach regarding its…
Peer support plays a vital role in expanding access to mental health care by providing empathetic, community-based support outside formal clinical systems. As digital platforms increasingly mediate such support, the design and impact of…
Many recent technological advances (e.g. ChatGPT and search engines) are possible only because of massive amounts of user-generated data produced through user interactions with computing systems or scraped from the web (e.g. behavior logs,…
In the current landscape of ever-increasing levels of digitalization, we are facing major challenges pertaining to scalability. Recommender systems have become irreplaceable both for helping users navigate the increasing amounts of data…
AI agents are increasingly transacting on behalf of users -- delegating tasks, spending budgets, and negotiating with unfamiliar counterparties. Unlike human marketplaces, which operate under institutional designs refined over centuries,…
In future distribution grids, prosumers (i.e., energy consumers with storage and/or production capabilities) will trade energy with each other and with the main grid. To ensure an efficient and safe operation of energy trading, in this…
With the sustained deployment of distributed generation capacities and the more proactive role of consumers, power systems and their operation are drifting away from a conventional top-down hierarchical structure. Electricity market…
The recent widespread adoption of rooftop solar backed by battery storage is enabling energy customers to both produce and consume electricity (i.e., prosumers of electricity). To facilitate prosumer participation in the electric grid, new…
After a century of relative stability of the electricity industry, extensive deployment of distributed energy resources and recent advances in computation and communication technologies have changed the nature of how we consume, trade, and…
It is well known that two-sided markets are unfair in a number of ways. For instance, female workers at Uber earn less than their male colleagues per mile driven. Similar observations have been made for other minority subgroups in other…
Globally distributed groups require collaborative systems to support their work. Besides being able to support the teamwork, these systems also should promote well-being and maximize the human potential that leads to an engaging system and…
Many interesting problems in the Internet industry can be framed as a two-sided marketplace problem. Examples include search applications and recommender systems showing people, jobs, movies, products, restaurants, etc. Incorporating…
This paper studies an incentive structure for cooperation and its stability in peer-assisted services when there exist multiple content providers, using a coalition game theoretic approach. We first consider a generalized coalition…
As we move towards more data intensive, device centric global communication networks, our ability to usefully harvest these large datastores is degrading. The widening asymmetry in the explosive growth of data versus our ability to use it,…