Related papers: Conveying Value via Categories
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
We study a communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with repeated interactions and voluntary transfers. Transfers motivate the receiver's decision-making and signal the sender's information. Although full…
We propose a framework to assess how to optimally sort and grade students of heterogenous ability. Potential employers face uncertainty regarding an individual's productive value. Knowing which school an individual went to is useful for two…
A monopolist sells multiple goods to an uninformed buyer. The buyer chooses to learn any one-dimensional linear signal of their values for the goods, anticipating the seller's mechanism. The seller designs an optimal mechanism, anticipating…
We initiate the study of the communication complexity of fair division with indivisible goods. We focus on some of the most well-studied fairness notions (envy-freeness, proportionality, and approximations thereof) and valuation classes…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
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…
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…
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…
We study the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents where each is to receive at most one. To ensure fairness in the absence of monetary compensation, we consider random assignments. Random Priority, also known as Random Serial…
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…
I describe a Bayesian persuasion problem where Receiver has a private type representing a cutoff for choosing Sender's preferred action, and Sender has maxmin preferences over all Receiver type distributions with known mean and bounds. This…
We investigate crowdsourcing algorithms for finding the top-quality item within a large collection of objects with unknown intrinsic quality values. This is an important problem with many relevant applications, for example in networked…
We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…
We study Bayesian Persuasion with multiple senders who have access to conditionally independent experiments (and possibly others). Senders have zero-sum preferences over information revealed. We characterize when any set of states can be…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…