Related papers: Procurement in welfare programs: Evidence and impl…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
This paper examines the recent reform of Morocco's public procurement market through the lens of Keynesian beauty contest theory. The reform introduces a mechanism akin to a guessing-the-average game, where bidders attempt to estimate a…
We consider the problem of maximizing the gains from trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. The seminal impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no individually rational (IR), Bayesian…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Despite the success of demand response programs in retail electricity markets in reducing average consumption, the random responsiveness of consumers to price event makes their efficiency questionable to achieve the flexibility needed for…
We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…
Time-varying electricity pricing better reflects the varying cost of electricity compared to flat-rate pricing. Variations between peak and off-peak costs are increasing due to weather variation, renewable intermittency, and increasing…
We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…
The rise of foundation models has driven the emergence of AI supply chains, where upstream foundation model providers offer fine-tuning and inference services to downstream firms developing domain-specific applications. Downstream firms pay…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
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…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
Online marketplaces use rating systems to promote the discovery of high-quality products. However, these systems also lead to high variance in producers' economic outcomes: a new producer who sells high-quality items, may unluckily receive…
Diffusion auction is a new model in auction design. It can incentivize the buyers who have already joined in the auction to further diffuse the sale information to others via social relations, whereby both the seller's revenue and the…
We consider the efficient outcome of a canonical economic market model involving buyers and sellers with independent and identically distributed random valuations and costs, respectively. When the number of buyers and sellers is large, we…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…
Government efforts to address child poverty commonly encompass economic assistance programs that bolster household income. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) is the most prominent example of this. Introduced by the United States Congress in 1997,…