Related papers: Selling Information Through Consulting
We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
The performance of an energy system under a real-time pricing mechanism depends on the consumption behavior of its customers, which involves uncertainties. In this paper, we consider a system operator that charges its customers with a…
Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Information that is of relevance for decision-making is often distributed, and held by self-interested agents. Decision markets are well-suited mechanisms to elicit such information and aggregate it into conditional forecasts that can be…
We study the notion of informedness in a client-consultant setting. Using a software simulator, we examine the extent to which it pays off for consultants to provide their clients with advice that is well-informed, or with advice that is…
We study information elicitation in cost-function-based combinatorial prediction markets when the market maker's utility for information decreases over time. In the sudden revelation setting, it is known that some piece of information will…
In many real world problems, optimization decisions have to be made with limited information. The decision maker may have no a priori or posteriori data about the often nonconvex objective function except from on a limited number of points…
In this paper, we study platforms where resources and jobs are spatially distributed, and resources have the flexibility to strategically move to different locations for better payoffs. The price of the service at each location depends on…
On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…
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,…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…
When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…
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…
We present a model of a forecaster who must predict the future value of a variable that depends on an exogenous state and on the intervention of a policy-maker. We investigate the incentives of the forecaster to acquire costly private…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
An asymmetric information model is introduced for the situation in which there is a small agent who is more susceptible to the flow of information in the market than the general market participant, and who tries to implement strategies…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…