Related papers: Luck Out or Outpay? Competing with a Public Option
We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…
We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…
This paper investigates the impacts of competition in autonomous mobility-on-demand systems. By adopting a network-flow based formulation, we first determine the optimal strategies of profit-maximizing platform operators in monopoly and…
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…
In this note, we consider the pricing problem of a profit-maximizing monopolist who faces naive consumers with convex self-control preferences.
We analyze digital markets where a monopolist platform uses data to match multiproduct sellers with heterogeneous consumers who can purchase both on and off the platform. The platform sells targeted ads to sellers that recommend their…
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…
We present a mechanism for reservations of bursty resources that is both truthful and robust. It consists of option contracts whose pricing structure induces users to reveal the true likelihoods that they will purchase a given resource.…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
When the traded energy and reserve products between zones are co-allocated to optimize the infrastructure usage, both deterministic and stochastic flows have to be accounted for on interconnector lines. We focus on allocation models, which…
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
This paper investigates the evolution of strategic play where players drawn from a finite well-mixed population are offered the opportunity to play in a public goods game. All players accept the offer. However, due to the possibility of…
We study economies where consumers interact independently with many monopolists. When consumer valuations over goods are correlated, correlation can distort the induced distribution of consumer surplus (information rents). We identify which…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
We study the link between political influence and industrial concentration. We present a joint model of political influence and market competition: an oligopoly lobbies the government over regulation, and competes in the product market…
Networking companies, especially the ones with the biggest market shares, tend to offer end to end solutions for their customers, with large discounts, that it would sound irrational to decline such offers, helping contractors make larger…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Discussions of the economics of scholarly communication are usually devoted to Open Access, rising journal prices, publisher profits, and boycotts. That ignores what seems a much more important development in this market. Publishers,…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…