Related papers: Selling Information Through Consulting
We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…
We study optimal information provision in transportation networks when users are strategic and the network state is uncertain. An omniscient planner observes the network state and discloses information to the users with the goal of…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
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…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We consider a data analyst's problem of purchasing data from strategic agents to compute an unbiased estimate of a statistic of interest. Agents incur private costs to reveal their data and the costs can be arbitrarily correlated with their…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…
Starting from the Avellaneda-Stoikov framework, we consider a market maker who wants to optimally set bid/ask quotes over a finite time horizon, to maximize her expected utility. The intensities of the orders she receives depend not only on…
A seller investigates a buyer before setting prices, balancing the cost of acquiring information against the gain from tailoring the contract to the buyer's private type. The optimal signal is coarse: no matter how rich the type space, the…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…
The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…
Persuasion, defined as the act of exploiting an informational advantage in order to effect the decisions of others, is ubiquitous. Indeed, persuasive communication has been estimated to account for almost a third of all economic activity in…
We propose an information-theoretic framework for analyzing control systems based on the close relationship of controllers to communication channels. A communication channel takes an input state and transforms it into an output state. A…
Applications of machine learning inform human decision makers in a broad range of tasks. The resulting problem is usually formulated in terms of a single decision maker. We argue that it should rather be described as a two-player learning…