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Related papers: Selling Information Through Consulting

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An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-08-27 Alex Suzdaltsev

In this paper, we explore a scenario where a sender provides an information policy and a receiver, upon observing a realization of this policy, decides whether to take a particular action, such as making a purchase. The sender's objective…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-12-13 Jorge Justiniano , Andreas Kleiner , Benny Moldovanu , Martin Rumpf , Philipp Strack

We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Mark Braverman , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , S. Matthew Weinberg

We consider the information design problem in spatial resource competition settings. Agents gather at a location deciding whether to move to another location for possibly higher level of resources, and the utility each agent gets by moving…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Pu Yang , Krishnamurthy Iyer , Peter Frazier

We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Zhikang Fan , Weiran Shen , Shaojie Tang , Yao Wang

We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Shao-Heng Ko , Kamesh Munagala

We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Yu Cheng , Nick Gravin , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller's and buyer's values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-10 Navin Kartik , Weijie Zhong

A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-01-03 Jerry Anunrojwong , Santiago R. Balseiro , Omar Besbes

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa

We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-01 Pranav Dandekar , Nadia Fawaz , Stratis Ioannidis

This paper studies optimal mechanisms for collecting and trading data. Consumers benefit from revealing information about their tastes to a service provider because this improves the service. However, the information is also valuable to a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-29 Jiadong Gu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-26 Junjie Chen , Takuro Yamashita

A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-03 Mira Frick , Ryota Iijima , Yuhta Ishii

We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-11-30 Arpita Ghosh , Aaron Roth

Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Boyu Liu , Wei Tang , Zihe Wang , Shuo Zhang

A policymaker discloses public information to interacting agents who also acquire costly private information. More precise public information reduces the precision and cost of acquired private information. Considering this effect, what…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-04-08 Takashi Ui

We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

The seller of an asset has the option to buy hard information about the value of the asset from an intermediary. The seller can then disclose the acquired information before selling the asset in a competitive market. We study how the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-10-19 S. Nageeb Ali , Nima Haghpanah , Xiao Lin , Ron Siegel