Related papers: Certification Design for a Competitive Market
The performance of a reinforcement learning algorithm can vary drastically during learning because of exploration. Existing algorithms provide little information about the quality of their current policy before executing it, and thus have…
In markets with budget-constrained buyers, competitive equilibria need not be efficient in the utilitarian sense, or maximise the seller's revenue. We consider a setting with multiple divisible goods. Competitive equilibrium outcomes, and…
The electricity industry has been one of the first to face technological changes motivated by sustainability concerns. Whilst efficiency aspects of market design have tended to focus upon market power concerns, the new policy challenges…
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…
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…
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…
When arranging for third-party data annotation, it can be hard to compare how well the competing providers apply best practices to create high-quality datasets. This leads to a "race to the bottom," where competition based solely on price…
Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…
We study statistical parameter estimation in the setting of data markets. A buyer seeks to estimate a parameter based on samples that can be purchased from competing providers that differ in their data quality and provision costs. When…
The aim of this paper is to address the effect of the carbon emission allowance market on the production policy of a large polluter production firm. We investigate this effect in two cases; when the large polluter cannot affect the risk…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
The plethora of comparison shopping agents (CSAs) in today's markets enables buyers to query more than a single CSA when shopping, and an inter-CSAs competition naturally arises. We suggest a new approach, termed "selective price…
In this paper, we ask the question of why the quality of commercial software, in terms of security and safety, does not measure up to that of other (durable) consumer goods we have come to expect. We examine this question through the lens…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
Context and Motivation: Natural language is the most common form to specify requirements in industry. The quality of the specification depends on the capability of the writer to formulate requirements aimed at different stakeholders: they…
This note considers cartel stability when the cartelized products are vertically differentiated. If market shares are maintained at pre-collusive levels, then the firm with the lowest competitive price-cost margin has the strongest…
A defining feature of digital goods is that replication and degradation are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, low-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. This paper studies quality-based…
Verification is the process of checking whether a product has been implemented according to its prescribed specifications. We study the case of a designer (the developer) that needs to verify its design by a third party (the verifier), by…