Related papers: Using Information to Amplify Competition

A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…

We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…

With the emergence of new online channels and information technology, digital advertising tends to substitute more and more to traditional advertising by offering the opportunity to companies to target the consumers/users that are really…

In many markets buyers are poorly informed about which firms sell the product (product availability) and prices, and therefore have to spend time to obtain this information. In contrast, sellers typically have a better idea about which…

We introduce pricing formulas for competition and collusion models of two-sided markets with an outside option. For the competition model, we find conditions under which prices and consumer surplus may increase or decrease if the outside…

Modern e-commerce services frequently target customers with incentives or interventions to engage them in their products such as games, shopping, video streaming, etc. This customer engagement increases acquisition of more customers and…

The state of economic theory and accumulated facts from the different branches of the economic science require to analyze the concept of the description of economy systems. The economic reality generates the problems the solution of that is…

ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have already…

I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…

Based on the success of recommender systems in e-commerce, there is growing interest in their use in matching markets (e.g., labor). While this holds potential for improving market fluidity and fairness, we show in this paper that naively…

We present a graph-theoretic model of consumer choice, where final decisions are shown to be influenced by information and knowledge, in the form of individual awareness, discriminating ability, and perception of market structure. Building…

We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…

Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…

We consider the problem of optimal consumption of multiple goods in incomplete semimartingale markets. We formulate the dual problem and identify conditions that allow for existence and uniqueness of the solution and give a characterization…

We analyze different ways of pairing agents in a bipartite matching problem, with regard to its scaling properties and to the distribution of individual ``satisfactions''. Then we explore the role of partial information and bounded…

We propose an incentive mechanism for the sponsored content provider market in which the communication of users can be represented by a graph and the private information of the users is assumed to have a continuous distribution function.…

The process of opinion formation through synthesis and contrast of different viewpoints has been the subject of many studies in economics and social sciences. Today, this process manifests itself also in online social networks and social…

In the age of information abundance, attention is a coveted resource. Social media platforms vigorously compete for users' engagement, influencing the evolution of their opinions on a variety of topics. With recommendation algorithms often…

We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…

We use citation data of scientific articles produced by individual nations in different scientific domains to determine the structure and efficiency of national research systems. We characterize the scientific fitness of each nation (that…