Related papers: Reputation Effects under Short Memories
We analyze reputation dynamics in an online market for illicit drugs using a novel dataset of prices and ratings. The market is a black market, and so contracts cannot be enforced. We study the role that reputation plays in alleviating…
We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…
Creating incentives for cooperation is a challenge in natural and artificial systems. One potential answer is reputation, whereby agents trade the immediate cost of cooperation for the future benefits of having a good reputation. Game…
In the experts problem, on each of $T$ days, an agent needs to follow the advice of one of $n$ ``experts''. After each day, the loss associated with each expert's advice is revealed. A fundamental result in learning theory says that the…
We examine the effects of memory and different updating paradigms in a game-theoretic model of competitive learning, where agents are influenced in their choice of strategy by both the choices made by, and the consequent success rates of,…
Partnering with a large online retailer, we consider the problem of sending daily personalized promotions to a userbase of over 20 million customers. We propose an efficient policy for determining, every day, the promotion that each…
Agents rarely act in isolation -- their behavioral history, in particular, is public to others. We seek a non-asymptotic understanding of how a leader agent should shape this history to its maximal advantage, knowing that follower agent(s)…
The understanding of cooperative behavior in social systems has been the subject of intense research over the past decades. In this regard, the theoretical models used to explain cooperation in human societies have been complemented with a…
Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…
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…
Reputation is one of key mechanisms to maintain human cooperation, but its analysis gets complicated if we consider the possibility that reputation does not reach consensus because of erroneous assessment. The difficulty is alleviated if we…
We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…
We examine whether a company's corporate reputation gained from their CSR activities and a company leader's reputation, one that is unrelated to his or her business acumen, can impact economic action fairness appraisals. We provide…
We study long-run market stability for repeated price competitions between two firms, where consumer demand depends on firms' posted prices and consumers' price expectations called reference prices. Consumers' reference prices vary over…
This paper considers behavior-based price discrimination in the repeated sale of a non-durable good to a single long-lived buyer, by a seller without commitment power. We assume that there is a mixed population of forward-looking…
In this paper, we study the effect of long memory in the learnability of a sequential recommender system including users' implicit feedback. We propose an online algorithm, where model parameters are updated user per user over blocks of…
We study the effect of persistence of engagement on learning in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In advertising and recommendation systems, repetition effect includes a wear-in period, where the user's propensity to reward the…
Motivated by cost of computation in game theory, we explore how changing the utilities of players (changing their complexity costs) affects the outcome of a game. We show that even if we improve a player's utility in every action profile,…
This paper analyzes the impact of peer effects on electricity consumption of a network of rational, utility-maximizing users. Users derive utility from consuming electricity as well as consuming less energy than their neighbors. However, a…
Session-based recommendation is a problem setting where the task of a recommender system is to make suitable item suggestions based only on a few observed user interactions in an ongoing session. The lack of long-term preference information…