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When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…
We conduct a field experiment on a movie-recommendation platform to investigate whether and how online recommendations influence consumption choices. Using a within-subjects design, our experiment measures the causal effect of…
Consequential decision-making typically incentivizes individuals to behave strategically, tailoring their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. A long line of work has therefore sought to counteract strategic behavior by designing…
An improved mathematical model of social group competition is proposed. The utility obtained by a member of a certain group from each other member is assumed to be group size-dependent. Obtained results are close to available census data.…
We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…
A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…
We investigate the motivation and means through which individuals expand their skill-set by analyzing a survey of applicants from the Facebook Jobs product. Individuals who report being influenced by their networks or local economy are over…
The conditions that can lead to the exploitative depletion of a shared resource, i.e, the tragedy of the commons, can be reformulated as a game of prisoner's dilemma: while preserving the common resource is in the best interest of the…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
Ranking models are typically designed to provide rankings that optimize some measure of immediate utility to the users. As a result, they have been unable to anticipate an increasing number of undesirable long-term consequences of their…
Evolution of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma and the public goods game is studied, where initially players belong to two independent structured populations. Simultaneously with the strategy evolution, players whose current utility…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
The number of Internet users had grown rapidly enticing companies and cooperations to make full use of recommendation infrastructures. Consequently, online advertisement companies emerged to aid us in the presence of numerous items and…
Most recommender systems (RS) research assumes that a user's utility can be maximized independently of the utility of the other agents (e.g., other users, content providers). In realistic settings, this is often not true---the dynamics of…
It is well known that differences in the average number of friends among social groups can cause inequality in the average wage and/or unemployment rate. However, the impact of social network structure on inequality is not evident. In this…
The theoretical study of social learning typically assumes that each agent's action affects only her own payoff. In this paper, I present a model in which agents' actions directly affect the payoffs of other agents. On a discrete time line,…
Online social as an extension of traditional life plays an important role in our daily lives. Users often seek out new friends that have significant similarities such as interests and habits, motivating us to exploit such online information…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…
Social marketing is becoming increasingly important in contemporary business. Central to social marketing is quantifying how consumers choose between alternatives and how they influence each other. This work considers a new but simple…