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A common explanation for negative user impacts of content recommender systems is misalignment between the platform's objective and user welfare. In this work, we show that misalignment in the platform's objective is not the only potential…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Online learning in arbitrary, and possibly adversarial, environments has been extensively studied in sequential decision-making, and it is closely connected to equilibrium computation in game theory. Most existing online learning algorithms…
Regret minimization is a general approach to online optimization which plays a crucial role in many algorithms for approximating Nash equilibria in two-player zero-sum games. The literature mainly focuses on solving individual games in…
Many years after online social networks exceeded our collective attention, social influence is still built on attention capital. Quality is not a prerequisite for viral spreading, yet large diffusion cascades remain the hallmark of a social…
With the fast progress of generative AI in recent years, more games are integrating generated content, raising questions regarding how players perceive and respond to this content. To investigate, we ran a mixed-method survey on the games…
In this work we study for the first time the interaction between marketing and network effects. We build a model in which the online firm starts with an initial user base and controls the growth of the user base by choosing the intensity of…
Personalized recommendation systems shape much of user choice online, yet their targeted nature makes separating out the value of recommendation and the underlying goods challenging. We build a discrete choice model that embeds…
Modern e-commerce services frequently target customers with incentives or interventions to engage them in their products such as games, shopping, video streaming, etc. This customer engagement increases acquisition of more customers and…
We study Cournot competition among firms in a networked marketplace that is centrally managed by a market maker. In particular, we study a situation in which a market maker facilitates trade between geographically separate markets via a…
A mechanism is described that addresses the fundamental trade off between media producers who want to increase reach and consumers who provide attention based on the rate of utility received, and where overreach negatively impacts that…
Price benchmarks are used to incorporate market price trends into contracts, but their use can create opportunities for manipulation by parties involved in the contract. This paper examines this issue using a realistic and tractable model…
Traditional recommender systems based on revealed preferences often fail to capture the fundamental duality in user behavior, where consumption choices are driven by both inherent value (enrichment) and instant appeal (temptation).…
The initial phase in real world engineering optimization and design is a process of discovery in which not all requirements can be made in advance, or are hard to formalize. Quality diversity algorithms, which produce a variety of high…
Over the past years, e-commerce platforms have expanded substantially, providing customers with convenient shopping experiences. To enhance e-commerce websites, it's essential to grasp user engagement and factors affecting conversion rates.…
Nowadays, many social media platforms are centered around content creators (CC). On these platforms, the tie formation process depends on two factors: (a) the exposure of users to CCs (decided by, e.g., a recommender system), and (b) the…
In decision-dependent games, multiple players optimize their decisions under a data distribution that shifts with their joint actions, creating complex dynamics in applications like market pricing. A practical consequence of these dynamics…
For sustainable growth and profitability, online game companies are constantly carrying out various events to attract new game users, to maximize return users, and to minimize churn users in online games. Because minimizing churn users is…
In online advertising, our aim is to match the advertisers with the most relevant users to optimize the campaign performance. In the pursuit of achieving this goal, multiple data sources provided by the advertisers or third-party data…
Social media algorithms are thought to amplify variation in user beliefs, thus contributing to radicalization. However, quantitative evidence on how algorithms and user preferences jointly shape harmful online engagement is limited. I…