Related papers: Data Provision to an Informed Seller
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
We develop a model of inter-temporal and intra-temporal price discrimination by monopoly airlines to study the ability of different discriminatory pricing mechanisms to increase efficiency and the associated distributional implications. To…
We consider a model of third-degree price discrimination where the seller's product valuation is unknown to the market designer, who aims to maximize buyer surplus by revealing buyer valuation information. Our main result shows that the…
Consider a market where a seller owns an item for sale and a buyer wants to purchase it. Each player has private information, known as their type. It can be costly and difficult for the players to reach an agreement through direct…
Contemporary recommender systems act as intermediaries on multi-sided platforms serving high utility recommendations from sellers to buyers. Such systems attempt to balance the objectives of multiple stakeholders including sellers, buyers,…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…
A marketplace is defined where the private data of suppliers (e.g., prosumers) are protected, so that neither their identity nor their level of stock is made known to end customers, while they can sell their products at a reduced price. A…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
In many settings, multiple uninformed agents bargain simultaneously with a single informed agent in each of multiple periods. For example, workers and firms negotiate each year over salaries, and the firm has private information about the…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
We develop a versatile methodology for multidimensional mechanism design that incorporates side information about agents to generate high welfare and high revenue simultaneously. Side information sources include advice from domain experts,…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
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…
This paper examines when the public provision of information in search markets improves welfare. I consider a two-sided frictional search market in which buyers match with vertically differentiated sellers. The market is segmented into…
This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…
A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…