Related papers: Advisors with Hidden Motives
We study computational questions in a game-theoretic model that, in particular, aims to capture advertising/persuasion applications such as viral marketing. Specifically, we consider a multi-agent Bayesian persuasion model where an informed…
We consider a dynamic pricing problem for repeated contextual second-price auctions with multiple strategic buyers who aim to maximize their long-term time discounted utility. The seller has limited information on buyers' overall demand…
Sensitive attributes such as race are rarely available to learners in real world settings as their collection is often restricted by laws and regulations. We give a scheme that allows individuals to release their sensitive information…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
An informed sender communicates with an uninformed receiver through a sequence of uninformed mediators; agents' utilities depend on receiver's action and the state. For any number of mediators, the sender's optimal value is characterized.…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…
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…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
The goal of recommender systems is to help users find useful items from a large catalog of items by producing a list of item recommendations for every user. Data sets based on implicit data collection have a number of special…
Extensive recent media focus has been directed towards the dark side of intelligent systems, how algorithms can influence society negatively. Often, transparency is proposed as a solution or step in the right direction. Unfortunately,…
In its most general form, a `secret objective' is any inconsistency between the experimental reality and the information provided to students prior to starting work on an experiment. Students are challenged to identify the secret objectives…
Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…
AI recommender systems are sought for decision support by providing suggestions to operators responsible for making final decisions. However, these systems are typically considered black boxes, and are often presented without any context or…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
The problem of market clearing is to set a price for an item such that quantity demanded equals quantity supplied. In this work, we cast the problem of predicting clearing prices into a learning framework and use the resulting models to…
I propose a cheap-talk model in which the sender can use private messages and only cares about persuading a subset of her audience. For example, a candidate only needs to persuade a majority of the electorate in order to win an election. I…
Increasing users' positive interactions, such as purchases or clicks, is an important objective of recommender systems. Recommenders typically aim to select items that users will interact with. If the recommended items are purchased, an…