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Different from shopping at retail stores, consumers on e-commerce platforms usually cannot touch or try products before purchasing, which means that they have to make decisions when they are uncertain about the outcome (e.g., satisfaction…
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…
In a modern recommender system, it is important to understand how products relate to each other. For example, while a user is looking for mobile phones, it might make sense to recommend other phones, but once they buy a phone, we might…
Top-N recommendation, which aims to learn user ranking-based preference, has long been a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications. Traditional models usually motivate themselves by designing complex or tailored architectures…
Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are…
Extensive research shows that consumers are generally averse to price discrimination. However, instruments of differential pricing can benefit consumer surplus and alleviate inequity through targeted price discounts. This paper examines how…
By the growing trend of online shopping and e-commerce websites, recommendation systems have gained more importance in recent years in order to increase the sales ratios of companies. Different algorithms on recommendation systems are used…
Two-sided marketplaces such as eBay, Etsy and Taobao have two distinct groups of customers: buyers who use the platform to seek the most relevant and interesting item to purchase and sellers who view the same platform as a tool to reach out…
Many information access systems operationalize their results in terms of rankings, which are then displayed to users in various ranking layouts such as linear lists or grids. User interaction with a retrieved item is highly dependent on the…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
We present empirical evidence on the relationship between demand shocks and price changes, conditional on returns to scale. We find that in industries with decreasing returns to scale, demand increases (which raise costs) correspond to…
Interference between treated and untreated units is a source of bias in marketplace experiments. In this paper, we specifically consider pricing interventions, in which a platform seeks to adjust base pricing levels at the marketplace level…
We study the problem of online learning in competitive settings in the context of two-sided matching markets. In particular, one side of the market, the agents, must learn about their preferences over the other side, the firms, through…
In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
This paper studies bargaining when buyers can continue searching for alternative sellers while negotiating, which limits their commitment to complete a transaction. Using transaction level data from a Japanese online marketplace, I document…
Recommender systems employ machine learning models to learn from historical data to predict the preferences of users. Deep neural network (DNN) models such as neural collaborative filtering (NCF) are increasingly popular. However, the…
There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…