Related papers: Selling Information
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
We study voluntary disclosure with multiple biased senders who may bear costs for disclosing or concealing their private information. Under relevant assumptions, disclosures are strategic substitutes under a disclosure cost but complements…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
We study the implications of selling through a voice-based virtual assistant (VA). The seller has a set of products available and the VA decides which product to offer and at what price, seeking to maximize its revenue, consumer- or…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users' private information…
We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. In a large class of binary-action games, opacity design is just as good as full commitment to actions…
We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
We consider an auction of identical digital goods to customers whose valuations are drawn independently from known distributions. Myerson's classic result identifies the truthful mechanism that maximizes the seller's expected profit. Under…
In the classical Bayesian persuasion model an informed player and an uninformed one engage in a static interaction. The informed player, the sender, knows the state of nature, while the uninformed one, the receiver, does not. The informed…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…
A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market wherein firms and consumers tailor their choices to the demand data. The social…
We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…
Traditional economic models typically treat private information, or signals, as generated from some underlying state. Recent work has explicated alternative models, where signals correspond to interpretations of available information. We…
We study dynamic signaling when the informed party does not observe the signals generated by her actions. A long-run player signals her type continuously over time to a myopic second player who privately monitors her behavior; in turn, the…
We model an informed agent with information about the future value of an asset trying to maximize profits when subjected to a transaction cost as well as a market maker tasked with setting fair transaction prices. In a single auction model,…