Related papers: Consumer Privacy and Serial Monopoly
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…
There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while…
We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…
We prove new positive and negative results concerning the existence of truthful and individually rational mechanisms for purchasing private data from individuals with unbounded and sensitive privacy preferences. We strengthen the…
We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…
I analyze a novel reputation game between a patient seller and a sequence of myopic consumers, in which the consumers have limited memories and do not know the exact sequence of the seller's actions. I focus on the case where each consumer…
As smart meters continue to be deployed around the world collecting unprecedented levels of fine-grained data about consumers, we need to find mechanisms that are fair to both, (1) the electric utility who needs the data to improve their…
While the entire field of privacy preserving data analytics is focused on the privacy-utility tradeoff, recent work has shown that privacy preserving data publishing can introduce different levels of utility across different population…
As privacy issues have gained social salience, entrepreneurs have begun to offer privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) and the U.S. has begun to enact privacy legislation. But "privacy" is an ambiguous notion. In the liberal tradition, it…
The concept of privacy is inherently intertwined with human attitudes and behaviours, as most computer systems are primarily designed for human use. Especially in the case of Recommender Systems, which feed on information provided by…
An expert seller chooses an experiment to influence a client's purchasing decision, but may manipulate the experiment result for personal gain. When credibility surpasses a critical threshold, the expert chooses a fully-revealing experiment…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
Motivated by the rapid push to decentralize sharing of data, we study whether large-scale data sharing coalitions can form in a decentralized manner under differential privacy when players have heterogeneous privacy preferences. We first…
Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…
A geo-marketplace allows users to be paid for their location data. Users concerned about privacy may want to charge more for data that pinpoints their location accurately, but may charge less for data that is more vague. A buyer would…
The past decade has seen tremendous shifts in how people live, work, and buy goods, with an increased reliance on e-commerce and deliveries. Purchase histories generated through e-commerce can be highly personal, revealing identifying…
Statistical agencies face a dual mandate to publish accurate statistics while protecting respondent privacy. Increasing privacy protection requires decreased accuracy. Recognizing this as a resource allocation problem, we propose an…
The structure of network data enables simple predictive models to leverage local correlations between nodes to high accuracy on tasks such as attribute and link prediction. While this is useful for building better user models, it introduces…
We develop a general model of discrete choice that incorporates peer effects in preferences and consideration sets. We characterize the equilibrium behavior and establish conditions under which all parts of the model can be recovered from a…