Related papers: Flexible Demand Manipulation
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing auctions for allocating multiple goods to flexible consumers. In our model, each consumer is interested in a subset of goods known as its flexibility set and wants to consume one good…
In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
Social marketing is becoming increasingly important in contemporary business. Central to social marketing is quantifying how consumers choose between alternatives and how they influence each other. This work considers a new but simple…
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…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
We study mechanism design when a designer repeatedly uses a fixed mechanism to interact with strategic agents who learn from observing their allocations. We introduce a static framework, calibrated mechanism design, requiring mechanisms to…
How can a system designer exploit system-level knowledge to derive incentives to optimally influence social behavior? The literature on network routing contains many results studying the application of monetary tolls to influence behavior…
In complex systems, many different parts interact in non-obvious ways. Traditional research focuses on a few or a single aspect of the problem so as to analyze it with the tools available. To get a better insight of phenomena that emerge…
In problems involving the allocation of a single non-disposable commodity, we study rules defined on a general domain of preferences requiring only that each preference exhibit a unique global maximum. Our focus is on rules that satisfy a…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
Income- and price-elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income, and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference-independence (additive preferences), mathematical…
Social media influencers account for a growing share of marketing worldwide. We demonstrate the existence of a novel form of market failure in this advertising market: influencer cartels, where groups of influencers collude to increase…
Modeling what makes an advertisement persuasive, i.e., eliciting the desired response from consumer, is critical to the study of propaganda, social psychology, and marketing. Despite its importance, computational modeling of persuasion in…
Prediction markets mobilize financial incentives to forecast binary event outcomes through the aggregation of dispersed beliefs and heterogeneous information. Their growing popularity and demonstrated predictive accuracy in political…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
We introduce the notion of performative power, which measures the ability of a firm operating an algorithmic system, such as a digital content recommendation platform, to cause change in a population of participants. We relate performative…
Dynamic pricing is commonly used to regulate congestion in shared service systems. This paper is motivated by the fact that in the presence of users with varying price sensitivity (responsiveness), conventional monotonic pricing can lead to…
The performance of an energy system under a real-time pricing mechanism depends on the consumption behavior of its customers, which involves uncertainties. In this paper, we consider a system operator that charges its customers with a…
A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…