Related papers: Content Filtering with Inattentive Information Con…
Recommendation and collaborative filtering systems are important in modern information and e-commerce applications. As these systems are becoming increasingly popular in the industry, their outputs could affect business decision making,…
We consider a repeated game where a player self-reports her usage of a service and is charged a payment accordingly by a center. The center observes a partial signal, representing part of the player's true consumption, which is generated…
Media publisher platforms often face an effectiveness-nuisance tradeoff: more annoying ads can be more effective for some advertisers because of their ability to attract attention, but after attracting viewers' attention, their nuisance to…
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…
We consider a community of users who must make periodic decisions about whether to interact with one another. We propose a protocol which allows honest users to reliably interact with each other, while limiting the damage done by each…
This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to…
Online platforms have a wealth of data, run countless experiments and use industrial-scale algorithms to optimize user experience. Despite this, many users seem to regret the time they spend on these platforms. One possible explanation is…
The spread of disinformation on social platforms is harmful to society. This harm may manifest as a gradual degradation of public discourse; but it can also take the form of sudden dramatic events such as the 2021 insurrection on Capitol…
We study a game of strategic information design between a sender, who chooses state-dependent information structures, a mediator who can then garble the signals generated from these structures, and a receiver who takes an action after…
We consider information retrieval when the data, for instance multimedia, is coputationally expensive to fetch. Our approach uses "information filters" to considerably narrow the universe of possiblities before retrieval. We are especially…
People learn about opportunities and actions by observing the experiences of their friends. We model how homophily -- the tendency to associate with similar others -- affects both the endogenous quality and diversity of the information…
We consider a generalization of the third degree price discrimination problem studied in Bergemann et al. (2015), where an intermediary between the buyer and the seller can design market segments to maximize any linear combination of…
Ranking is a fundamental operation in information access systems, to filter information and direct user attention towards items deemed most relevant to them. Due to position bias, items of similar relevance may receive significantly…
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…
A researcher allocates a budget of informative tests across multiple unknown attributes to influence a decision-maker. We derive the researcher's equilibrium learning strategy by solving an auxiliary single-player problem. The attribute…
Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation considers spatio-temporal factors like distance, peak hours, and user check-ins. Given their influence on both consumer experience and POI business, it's crucial to consider fairness from multiple…
I study repeated communication games between a patient sender and a sequence of receivers. The sender has persistent private information about his psychological cost of lying, and in every period, can privately observe the realization of an…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
Many fairness criteria constrain the policy or choice of predictors, which can have unwanted consequences, in particular, when optimizing the policy under such constraints. Here, we advocate to instead focus on the utility function the…
We study privacy-utility trade-offs where users share privacy-correlated useful information with a service provider to obtain some utility. The service provider is adversarial in the sense that it can infer the users' private information…