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A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a…
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing "the social fabric" (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
We design mechanisms for maintaining public goods which require periodic in-kind contributions, motivated by incentives problems facing crowd-sourced recommender systems. Utilitarian welfare is maximized by redistributive policies which are…
With the overwhelming online products available in recent years, there is an increasing need to filter and deliver relevant personalized advice for users. Recommender systems solve this problem by modeling and predicting individual…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
In many settings, money is a tool of exchange with minimal inherent utility --- agents will spend it in a way that maximizes the value of goods received subject to reasonable constraints, giving only second-order consideration to the…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
Redistribution mechanisms have been proposed for more efficient resource allocation but not for profit. We consider redistribution mechanism design in a setting where participants are connected and the resource owner is only connected to…
In recent years, a new branch of auction models called diffusion auction has extended the traditional auction into social network scenarios. The diffusion auction models the auction as a networked market whose nodes are potential customers…
We study a model of collective real-time decision-making (or learning) in a social network operating in an uncertain environment, for which no a priori probabilistic model is available. Instead, the environment's impact on the agents in the…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
While there is ample evidence that social and communication networks play a key role during the spread of new ideas, products, or services, network effects are expected to have diminished influence in the stationary state, when all users…
A determinant property of the structure of a biological network is the distribution of local connectivity patterns, i.e., network motifs. In this work, a method for creating directed, unweighted networks while promoting a certain…
Viral marketing takes advantage of preexisting social networks among customers to achieve large changes in behaviour. Models of influence spread have been studied in a number of domains, including the effect of "word of mouth" in the…
We discuss price competition when positive network effects are the only other factor in consumption choices. We show that partitioning consumers into two groups creates a rich enough interaction structure to induce negative marginal demand…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Driven by the new economic opportunities created by the creator economy, an increasing number of content creators rely on and compete for revenue generated from online content recommendation platforms. This burgeoning competition reshapes…
I characterize the consumer-optimal market segmentation in competitive markets where multiple firms selling differentiated products to consumers with unit demand. This segmentation is public---in that each firm observes the same market…