Related papers: Monopoly, Product Quality, and Flexible Learning
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 study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We consider a nonlinear pricing environment with private information. We provide profit guarantees (and associated mechanisms) that the seller can achieve across all possible distributions of willingness to pay of the buyers. With a…
We study balanced exchange problems in which agents with responsive preferences are endowed with multiple indivisible objects and can trade without transfers (e.g. shift exchange, time-banking). Eliciting full preferences over bundles is…
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…
The existing studies on consumer search agree that consumers are worse-off when they do not observe sellers' production marginal cost than when they do. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. Employing a canonical model of simultaneous…
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…
Economic institutions often influence market outcomes not by directly controlling sellers' menus, but by shaping the market composition sellers face. We study the welfare effects of this upstream choice in a monopoly screening model. An…
We study the extent to which standard machine learning algorithms rely on exchangeability and independence of data by introducing a monotone adversarial corruption model. In this model, an adversary, upon looking at a "clean" i.i.d.…
We consider a deterministic continuous time model of monopolistic firm, which chooses production and pricing strategies of a single good. Firm's goal is to maximize the discounted profit over infinite time horizon. The no-backlogging…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique…
In continuous-choice settings, consumers decide not only on whether to purchase a product, but also on how much to purchase. Thus, firms optimize a full price schedule rather than a single price point. This paper provides a methodology to…
A monopolist sells goods with possibly a characteristic consumers dislike (for instance, he sells random goods to risk averse agents), which does not affect the production costs. We investigate the question whether using undesirable goods…
We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…
A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this…
We consider the problem of a firm seeking to use personalized pricing to sell an exogenously given stock of a product over a finite selling horizon to different consumer types. We assume that the type of an arriving consumer can be observed…
We study a game with \emph{strategic} vendors who own multiple items and a single buyer with a submodular valuation function. The goal of the vendors is to maximize their revenue via pricing of the items, given that the buyer will buy the…
Machine learning models play a key role for service providers looking to gain market share in consumer markets. However, traditional learning approaches do not take into account the existence of additional providers, who compete with each…