Related papers: Cued to Queue: Information in Waiting-Line Auction…
This paper considers the problem of offering a scarce object with a common unobserved quality to strategic agents in a priority queue. Each agent has a private signal over the quality of the object and observes the decisions made by other…
Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…
We analyze the dynamic tradeoff between generating and disclosing evidence. Agents are tempted to delay investing in a new technology in order to learn from information generated by the experiences of others. This informational free-riding…
Delay or queue length information has the potential to influence the decision of a customer to use a service system. Thus, it is imperative for service system managers to understand how the information that they provide will affect the…
Motivated by online platforms such as job markets, we study an agent choosing from a list of candidates, each with a hidden quality that determines match value. The agent observes only a noisy ranking of the candidates plus a binary signal…
Prediction markets are powerful tools to elicit and aggregate beliefs from strategic agents. However, in current prediction markets, agents may exhaust the social welfare by competing to be the first to update the market. We initiate the…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
In online markets, agents often learn from other's actions in addition to their private information. Such observational learning can lead to herding or information cascades in which agents eventually ignore their private information and…
An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand, yet such information is often obtained through intermediaries with biased preferences. Motivated by settings such as testing and recertification in organ transplantation, we…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
This paper studies information asymmetry in an unobservable single-server queueing system. While system managers have knowledge of the true arrival rate, customers may lack this information and instead form arbitrary beliefs. We propose a…
This note examines the distributional implications of introducing a fast-track queue for accessing a service when agents are heterogeneous in both income and service valuation. Relative to a single free queue, I show that willingness to…
When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…
The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…
We study a cost sharing problem derived from bug bounty programs, where agents gain utility by the amount of time they get to enjoy the cost shared information. Once the information is provided to an agent, it cannot be retracted. The goal,…
We study an admissions control problem, where a queue with service rate $1-p$ receives incoming jobs at rate $\lambda\in(1-p,1)$, and the decision maker is allowed to redirect away jobs up to a rate of $p$, with the objective of minimizing…
When human agents come together to make decisions, it is often the case that one human agent has more information than the other. This phenomenon is called information asymmetry and this distorts the market. Often if one human agent intends…