Related papers: Bundling against Learning
Product bundling is a common selling mechanism used in online retailing. To set profitable bundle prices, the seller needs to learn consumer preferences from the transaction data. When customers purchase bundles or multiple products,…
A single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…
We study strategic interactions in a broker-mediated market in which agents learn and exploit each other's private information. A broker provides liquidity to an informed trader and to noise traders while managing inventory in a lit market.…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
We study the ranking problem in generalized linear bandits. At each time, the learning agent selects an ordered list of items and observes stochastic outcomes. In recommendation systems, displaying an ordered list of the most attractive…
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…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…
A number of products are sold in the following sequence: First a focal product is shown, and if the customer purchases, one or more ancillary products are displayed for purchase. A prominent example is the sale of an airline ticket, where…
We study multi-product monopoly pricing where the seller jointly designs the selling mechanism and the information structure for the buyer to learn his values. Unlike the case with exogenous information, we show that when the seller…
We consider a group of strategic agents who must each repeatedly take one of two possible actions. They learn which of the two actions is preferable from initial private signals, and by observing the actions of their neighbors in a social…
Consumers discover their preferences through experience, yet the sequence and composition of those experiences are often designed by firms, digital platforms, or policymakers. We introduce a ``data-design'' framework for preference…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
This paper studies learning in markets with aggregate uncertainty about whether trade is efficient. A long-lived seller offers prices to buyers, who are short-lived and arrive according to a Poisson process. A hidden state determines…
Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…
We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…
A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…