Related papers: Gatekeeping, Selection, and Welfare
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…
Suppliers of differentiated goods make simultaneous pricing decisions, which are strategically linked. Because of market power, the equilibrium is inefficient. We study how a policymaker should target a budget-balanced tax-and-subsidy…
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…
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…
This paper examines an adverse selection environment where a sender with private information (high or low ability) tries to convince a receiver of having higher ability. Without commitment or costly signaling, market failure can occur.…
Explore-and-exploit tradeoffs play a key role in recommendation systems (RSs), aiming at serving users better by learning from previous interactions. Despite their commercial success, the societal effects of explore-and-exploit mechanisms…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
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…
If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand…
We study the efficiency of allocations in large markets with a network structure where every seller owns an edge in a graph and every buyer desires a path connecting some nodes. While it is known that stable allocations in such settings can…
Less-salient taxes can ease the classic equality-efficiency trade-off by making people respond less to taxation. But deliberately obscuring taxes may be viewed as dishonest. This creates a three-way trade-off between equality, efficiency,…
Information frictions can harm the welfare of participants in two-sided matching markets. Consider a centralized admission, where colleges cannot observe students' preparedness for success in a particular major or degree program. Colleges…
This paper studies a decentralized many-to-one matching market where preferences remain uncertain during the matching process. Institutions initiate matching by sending offers, and applicants decide whether to accept upon receiving them.…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
Systemic bias with respect to gender, race and ethnicity, often unconscious, is prevalent in datasets involving choices among individuals. Consequently, society has found it challenging to alleviate bias and achieve diversity in a way that…
Conventionally, random forests are built from "greedy" decision trees which each consider only one split at a time during their construction. The sub-optimality of greedy implementation has been well-known, yet mainstream adoption of more…
We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…
The traditional framework for feature selection treats all features as costing the same amount. However, in reality, a scientist often has considerable discretion regarding which variables to measure, and the decision involves a tradeoff…
We study the design of loss functions for click-through rates (CTR) to optimize (social) welfare in advertising auctions. Existing works either only focus on CTR predictions without consideration of business objectives (e.g., welfare) in…