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People often learn from other's actions when they make decisions while doing online shopping. This kind of observational learning may lead to information cascades, which means agents might ignore their own signals and follow the 'trend'…

We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…

Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual…

We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to agents in an online setting, where goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated irrevocably. Focusing on the popular fairness notions of envy-freeness, proportionality, and…

Decisions are often made by heterogeneous groups of individuals, each with distinct initial biases and access to information of different quality. We show that in large groups of independent agents who accumulate evidence the first to…

It is well known that sequential decision making may lead to information cascades. That is, when agents make decisions based on their private information, as well as observing the actions of those before them, then it might be rational to…

Lost sales inventory models with large lead times, which arise in many practical settings, are notoriously difficult to optimize due to the curse of dimensionality. In this paper we show that when lead times are large, a very simple…

"Big data" gives markets access to previously unmeasured characteristics of individual agents. Policymakers must decide whether and how to regulate the use of this data. We study how new data affects incentives for agents to exert effort in…

The recent trend for acquiring big data assumes that possessing quantitatively more and qualitatively finer data necessarily provides an advantage that may be critical in competitive situations. Using a model complex adaptive system where…

In many real-world strategic settings, people use information displays to make decisions. In these settings, an information provider chooses which information to provide to strategic agents and how to present it, and agents formulate a best…

We study a make-to-order system with a finite set of customers. Production is stochastic with a nonlinear dependence between the ordered quantity and the production rate. Customers may have to queue until their turn arrives, and therefore…

Recent research in the social sciences has identified situations in which small changes in the way that information is provided to consumers can have large aggregate effects on behavior. This has been promoted in popular media in areas of…

We investigate the optimal pricing strategy in a service-providing framework, where customers can leave the system prior to service completion. In this setting, a price is quoted to an incoming customer based on the current number of…

An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication…

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…

We study how partial information about scoring rules affects fairness in strategic learning settings. In strategic learning, a learner deploys a scoring rule, and agents respond strategically by modifying their features -- at some cost --…

A model of Boolean agents competing in a market is presented where each agent bases his action on information obtained from a small group of other agents. The agents play a competitive game that rewards those in the minority. After a long…

Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information,…

We study how information perturbations can destabilize two-sided matching markets. In our model, agents arrive on the market over two periods, while agents in the first period do not know the types of those arriving later. Agents already…