Related papers: Transparency and Policymaking with Endogenous Info…

We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…

Recommender system has been deployed in a large amount of real-world applications, profoundly influencing people's daily life and production.Traditional recommender models mostly collect as comprehensive as possible user behaviors for…

In this work, we propose information laundering, a novel framework for enhancing model privacy. Unlike data privacy that concerns the protection of raw data information, model privacy aims to protect an already-learned model that is to be…

Recommender systems are known to suffer from the popularity bias problem: popular (i.e. frequently rated) items get a lot of exposure while less popular ones are under-represented in the recommendations. Research in this area has been…

We consider a team-production environment where all participants are motivated by career concerns, and where a team's joint productive outcome may have different reputational implications for different team members. In this context, we…

We study an extension of the voter model in which each agent is endowed with an innate preference for one of two states that we term as "truth" or "falsehood". Due to interactions with neighbors, an agent that innately prefers truth can be…

Reputation plays a major role in human societies, and it has been proposed as an explanation for the evolution of cooperation. While the majority of previous studies equates reputation with a transparent and complete history of players'…

A principal can restrict an agent's information (the persuasion problem) or restrict an agent's discretion (the delegation problem). We show that these problems are generally equivalent - solving one solves the other. We use tools from the…

Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…

We study the notion of informedness in a client-consultant setting. Using a software simulator, we examine the extent to which it pays off for consultants to provide their clients with advice that is well-informed, or with advice that is…

What are the value and form of optimal persuasion when information can be generated only slowly? We study this question in a dynamic model in which a 'sender' provides public information over time subject to a graduality constraint, and a…

We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is…

In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…

We study information disclosure in competitive markets with adverse selection. Sellers privately observe product quality, with higher quality entailing higher production costs, while buyers trade at the market-clearing price after observing…

Deliberation among individuals online plays a key role in shaping the opinions that drive votes, purchases, donations and other critical offline behavior. Yet, the determinants of opinion-change via persuasion in deliberation online remain…

Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…

How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…

We investigate how information-spreading mechanisms affect opinion dynamics and vice-versa via an agent-based simulation on adaptive social networks. First, we characterize the impact of reposting on user behavior with limited memory, a…

What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…

We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…