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This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-16 Chang Liu

Recommender systems suffer from confounding biases when there exist confounders affecting both item features and user feedback (e.g., like or not). Existing causal recommendation methods typically assume confounders are fully observed and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Xinyuan Zhu , Yang Zhang , Fuli Feng , Xun Yang , Dingxian Wang , Xiangnan He

When subjected to automated decision-making, decision subjects may strategically modify their observable features in ways they believe will maximize their chances of receiving a favorable decision. In many practical situations, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Keegan Harris , Valerie Chen , Joon Sik Kim , Ameet Talwalkar , Hoda Heidari , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Collaborative learning techniques have the potential to enable training machine learning models that are superior to models trained on a single entity's data. However, in many cases, potential participants in such collaborative schemes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Florian E. Dorner , Nikola Konstantinov , Georgi Pashaliev , Martin Vechev

A ubiquitous learning problem in today's digital market is, during repeated interactions between a seller and a buyer, how a seller can gradually learn optimal pricing decisions based on the buyer's past purchase responses. A fundamental…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Quinlan Dawkins , Minbiao Han , Haifeng Xu

This paper aims to investigate and achieve seller-side fairness within online marketplaces, where many sellers and their items are not sufficiently exposed to customers in an e-commerce platform. This phenomenon raises concerns regarding…

A foundational approach is developed for a mathematical theory of managerial disclosure in relation to asset pricing; this involves both the earnings guidance disclosed by firm management and market `trackers' pricing the firm's exposure to…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2020-02-13 M. Gietzmann , A. J. Ostaszewski , M. H. G. Schröder

How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-21 Klajdi Hoxha

A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-11-21 Ian Ball , Xin Gao

Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-08-18 S. Nageeb Ali , Greg Lewis , Shoshana Vasserman

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa

This paper demonstrates the potential of statistical disclosure control for protecting the data used to train recommender systems. Specifically, we use a synthetic data generation approach to hide specific information in the user-item…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Manel Slokom , Martha Larson , Alan Hanjalic

We study multi-product monopoly pricing where the seller jointly designs the selling mechanism and the information structure for the buyer to learn his values. Unlike the case with exogenous information, we show that when the seller…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Yang Cai , Yingkai Li , Jinzhao Wu

We model an informed agent with information about the future value of an asset trying to maximize profits when subjected to a transaction cost as well as a market maker tasked with setting fair transaction prices. In a single auction model,…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2020-07-29 Weston Barger , Ryan Donnelly

Consumers are increasingly delegating purchase decisions to AI agents, providing natural-language descriptions of their preferences and identity. We argue that these representations constitute an information channel, role coherence, through…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Soogand Alavi , Salar Nozari

A multiproduct seller is more informed than consumers about the value of her products to consumers. The seller posts a price list and segments the market through cheap-talk communication. We find that when both seller's and consumers'…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-28 Xiaoxiao Hu , Haoran Lei

The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-04-26 Moshe Babaioff , Robert Kleinberg , Renato Paes Leme

Transparency of information disclosure has always been considered an instrumental component of effective governance, accountability, and ethical behavior in any organization or system. However, a natural question follows: \emph{what is the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Tao Li , Quanyan Zhu

We present our approach to the problem of how an agent, within an economic Multi-Agent System, can determine when it should behave strategically (i.e. learn and use models of other agents), and when it should act as a simple price-taker. We…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Jose M. Vidal , Edmund H. Durfee

This paper considers behavior-based price discrimination in the repeated sale of a non-durable good to a single long-lived buyer, by a seller without commitment power. We assume that there is a mixed population of forward-looking…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Rishi Patel , Emmanouil Pountourakis , Samuel Taggart