Related papers: Price-Based Attention and Welfare
How should we decide which fairness criteria or definitions to adopt in machine learning systems? To answer this question, we must study the fairness preferences of actual users of machine learning systems. Stringent parity constraints on…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…
Recovering and distinguishing between the strict-preference, indifference and/or indecisiveness parts of a decision maker's preferences is a challenging task but also important for testing theory and conducting welfare analysis. This paper…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
This paper develops strategic foundations for an important statistical model of random networks with heterogeneous expected degrees. Based on this, we show how social networking services that subtly alter the costs and indirect benefits of…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
In recommendation settings, there is an apparent trade-off between the goals of accuracy (to recommend items a user is most likely to want) and diversity (to recommend items representing a range of categories). As such, real-world…
When inferring the causal effect of one variable on another from correlational data, a common practice by professional researchers as well as lay decision makers is to control for some set of exogenous confounding variables. Choosing an…
In uniform-price markets, suppliers compete to supply a resource to consumers, resulting in a single market price determined by their competition. For sufficient flexibility, producers and consumers prefer to commit to a function as their…
In the allocation of resources to a set of agents, how do fairness guarantees impact the social welfare? A quantitative measure of this impact is the price of fairness, which measures the worst-case loss of social welfare due to fairness…
The Random Utility Model (RUM) is the gold standard in describing the behavior of a population of consumers. The RUM operates under the assumption of transitivity in consumers' preference relationships, but the empirical literature has…
We consider the efficient outcome of a canonical economic market model involving buyers and sellers with independent and identically distributed random valuations and costs, respectively. When the number of buyers and sellers is large, we…
We study the problem when a firm sets prices for products based on the transaction data, i.e., which product past customers chose from an assortment and what were the historical prices that they observed. Our approach does not impose a…
Firms that price perishable resources -- airline seats, hotel rooms, seasonal inventory -- now routinely use demand predictions, but these predictions vary widely in quality. Under hard capacity constraints, acting on an inaccurate…
There are clear benefits associated with a particular consumer choice for many current markets. For example, as we consider here, some products might carry environmental or `green' benefits. Some consumers might value these benefits while…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…
We develop a nonparametric approach to identify and estimate consumer preferences and unobserved heterogeneity under nonlinear price schedules. Leveraging variation across multiple price schedules, we show that both the utility function and…
Academic research in the field of recommender systems mainly focuses on the problem of maximizing the users' utility by trying to identify the most relevant items for each user. However, such items are not necessarily the ones that maximize…