Related papers: Pricing group membership
People choose friendships with people similar to themselves, i.e. they sort by resemblence. Economic studies have shown when sorting is optimal and constitute an equilibrium, however, this presumes lack of beneficial spillovers. We…
We consider a strategic M/M/1 queueing model under a first-come-first-served regime, where customers are split into two classes and class $A$ has priority over class $B$. Customers can decide whether to join the queue or balk, and, in case…
Most products are produced and sold by supply chain networks, where an interconnected network of producers and intermediaries set prices to maximize their profits. I show that there exists a unique equilibrium in a price-setting game on a…
We investigate a group choice problem of agents pursuing social status. We assume heterogeneous agents want to signal their private information (ability, income, patience, altruism, etc.) to others, facing tradeoff between "outside status"…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…
We investigate the design of mechanisms to incentivize high quality in crowdsourcing environments with strategic agents, when entry is an endogenous, strategic choice. Modeling endogenous entry in crowdsourcing is important because there is…
This paper proposes a stylized, dynamic model to address the issue of sorting online. There are two large homogeneous groups of individuals. Everyone must choose between two online platforms, one of which has superior amenities (akin to…
We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…
We model stochastic choices with categorization. The agent preliminarly groups alternatives in homogenous disjoint classes, then randomly chooses one class and randomly picks an item within the selected class. We give a formal definition of…
We introduce and study a model of an interacting population of agents who collaborate in groups which compete for limited resources. Groups are formed by random matching agents and their worth is determined by the sum of the efforts…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
Organizations face numerous challenges posed by unexpected events such as energy price hikes, pandemic disruptions, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters, and the factors that contribute to organizational success in dealing with such…
We study a market mechanism that sets edge prices to incentivize strategic agents to efficiently share limited network capacity. In this market, agents form coalitions, with each coalition sharing a unit capacity of a selected route and…
The partition of society into groups, polarization, and social networks are part of most conversations today. How do they influence price competition? We discuss Bertrand duopoly equilibria with demand subject to network effects. Contrary…
We fully solve a sorting problem with heterogeneous firms and multiple heterogeneous workers whose skills are imperfect substitutes. We show that optimal sorting, which we call mixed and countermonotonic, is comprised of two regions. In the…
We examine a controlled school choice model where students are categorized into different types, and the distribution of these types within a school influences its priority structure. This study provides a general framework that integrates…
We study the self-assembly of a complex network of collaborations among self-interested agents. The agents can maintain different levels of cooperation with different partners. Further, they continuously, selectively, and independently…
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…
The theoretical study of social learning typically assumes that each agent's action affects only her own payoff. In this paper, I present a model in which agents' actions directly affect the payoffs of other agents. On a discrete time line,…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…