Related papers: Optimal Pricing of Information
This paper studies a dynamic information acquisition model with payoff externalities. Two players can acquire costly information about an unknown state before taking a safe or risky action. Both information and the action taken are private.…
We study optimal auction design in an independent private values environment where bidders can endogenously -- but at a cost -- improve information about their own valuations. The optimal mechanism is two-stage: at stage-1 bidders register…
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 --…
We consider a generalization of the third degree price discrimination problem studied in Bergemann et al. (2015), where an intermediary between the buyer and the seller can design market segments to maximize any linear combination of…
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 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…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…
We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…
We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…
This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation of a product over time. We consider a class of refund mechanisms based on stochastic return policies: if the…
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…
Many smart grid frameworks, such as demand response programs, require accurate information about consumers' parameters (e.g., flexibility) at the aggregator side to optimize grid operations. Existing works typically rely on perfect…
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…
In social learning environments, agents acquire information from both private signals and the observed actions of predecessors, referred to as history. We define the value of history as the gain in expected payoff from accessing both the…
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…