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When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…
The intrusiveness and the increasing invasiveness of online advertising have, in the last few years, raised serious concerns regarding user privacy and Web usability. As a reaction to these concerns, we have witnessed the emergence of a…
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…
Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…
We analyze the value to e-commerce website operators of offering privacy options to users, e.g., of allowing users to opt out of ad targeting. In particular, we assume that site operators have some control over the cost that a privacy…
Competition between traditional platforms is known to improve user utility by aligning the platform's actions with user preferences. But to what extent is alignment exhibited in data-driven marketplaces? To study this question from a…
In the current digital age of the Internet, with ever-growing networks and data-driven business models, digital platforms and especially marketplaces are becoming increasingly important. These platforms focus primarily on digital businesses…
We model the role of an online platform disrupting a market with unit-demand buyers and unit-supply sellers. Each seller can transact with a subset of the buyers whom she already knows, as well as with any additional buyers to whom she is…
We develop a framework for the analysis of large-scale Ad-auctions where adverts are assigned over a continuum of search types. For this pay-per-click market, we provide an efficient mechanism that maximizes social welfare. In particular,…
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…
This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to…
Online platforms collect rich information about participants and then share some of this information back with them to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem in two-sided markets: If a…
Advertisements (ads) are an innate part of search engine business models. Advertisers are willing to pay search engines to promote their content to a prominent position in the search result page (SERP). This raises concerns about the search…
We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…
In fashion e-commerce platforms, product discovery is one of the key components of a good user experience. There are numerous ways using which people find the products they desire. Similar product recommendations is one of the popular modes…
Targeted advertising remains an important part of the free web browsing experience, where advertisers' targeting and personalization algorithms together find the most relevant audience for millions of ads every day. However, given the wide…
The enormous financial success of online advertising platforms is partially due to the precise targeting features they offer. Although researchers and journalists have found many ways that advertisers can target---or exclude---particular…
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…
Fairness in advertising is a topic of particular concern motivated by theoretical and empirical observations in both the computer science and economics literature. We examine the problem of fairness in advertising for general purpose…
We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…