Related papers: Token Is All You Price
This position paper argues that agentic AI systems should be designed and evaluated as \emph{marginal token allocation economies} rather than as text generators priced by the unit. We follow a single request -- a developer asking a coding…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
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…
With the rapid advancement of generative AI (GenAI), mechanism design adapted to its unique characteristics poses new theoretical and practical challenges. Unlike traditional goods, content from one domain can enhance the training and…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
We investigate a seller's revenue-maximizing mechanism in a setting where a desirable good is sold together with an undesirable bad (e.g., advertisements) that generates third-party revenue. The buyer's private information is…
GenAI services are in an early yet fast expanding phase. Providers compete on model capability and service quality, while the underlying infrastructure remains expensive and heterogeneous across regions, workloads, and compute assets. If…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
In markets where algorithmic data processing is increasingly prevalent, recommendation algorithms can substantially affect trade and welfare. We consider a setting in which an algorithm recommends a product based on its value to the buyer…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
Generative AI does more than cut costs. It pulls products toward a shared template, making offerings look and feel more alike while making true originality disproportionately expensive. We capture this centripetal force in a standard…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
The design of optimal auctions is a problem of interest in economics, game theory and computer science. Despite decades of effort, strategyproof, revenue-maximizing auction designs are still not known outside of restricted settings.…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…