Related papers: Data, Competition, and Digital Platforms
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…
Algorithms for determining quality/cost/price tradeoffs in saturated markets are considered. A product is modeled by $d$ real-valued qualities whose sum determines the unit cost of producing the product. This leads to the following…
As e-commerce marketplaces continue to grow in popularity, it has become increasingly important to understand the role and impact of marketplace operators on competition and social welfare. We model a marketplace operator as an entity that…
We develop a stochastic equilibrium model for an electricity market with asymmetric renewable energy forecasts. In our setting, market participants optimize their profits using public information about a conditional expectation of energy…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
An information broker incentivizes consumers to share their information, while designing an information structure to shape the market segmentation. The information broker is a metaphor for an Internet platform that matches consumers with…
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…
This paper aims to investigate and achieve seller-side fairness within online marketplaces, where many sellers and their items are not sufficiently exposed to customers in an e-commerce platform. This phenomenon raises concerns regarding…
The Web of Data (WoD) has experienced a phenomenal growth in the past. This growth is mainly fueled by tireless volunteers, government subsidies, and open data legislations. The majority of commercial data has not made the transition to the…
Fisher markets are those where buyers with budgets compete for scarce items, a natural model for many real world markets including online advertising. A market equilibrium is a set of prices and allocations of items such that supply meets…
As machine learning (ML) is deployed by many competing service providers, the underlying ML predictors also compete against each other, and it is increasingly important to understand the impacts and biases from such competition. In this…
In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…
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…
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…
Data markets are emerging as key mechanisms for trading personal and organizational data. Traditional data pricing studies -- such as query-based or arbitrage-free pricing models -- mainly emphasize price consistency and profit maximization…
We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework, where a seller not only sets product price but also designs flexible 'advertising schemes' to influence customers' valuation of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the…
Although both data availability and the demand for accurate forecasts are increasing, collaboration between stakeholders is often constrained by data ownership and competitive interests. In contrast to recent proposals within cooperative…
Online platforms, including social media and search platforms, have routinely used their users' data for targeted ads, to improve their services, and to sell to third-party buyers. But an increasing awareness of the importance of users'…
In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the…
Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine…