Related papers: Regulating a Monopolist without Subsidy

A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces…

This paper examines whether one can learn to play an optimal action while only knowing part of true specification of the environment. We choose the optimal pricing problem as our laboratory, where the monopolist is endowed with an…

In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…

Control systems involving unknown parameters appear a natural framework for applications in which the model design has to take into account various uncertainties. In these circumstances the performance criterion can be given in terms of an…

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 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…

We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…

We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…

We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…

Regulation is a major driver of housing supply, yet often difficult to observe directly. This paper estimates frontier cost, the non-land cost of producing housing absent regulation, and regulatory tax, which quantifies regulation in money…

We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…

Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…

Economic institutions often influence market outcomes not by directly controlling sellers' menus, but by shaping the market composition sellers face. We study the welfare effects of this upstream choice in a monopoly screening model. An…

We introduce an agent-based model, in which agents set their prices to maximize profit. At steady state the market self-organizes into three groups: excess producers, consumers and balanced agents, with prices determined by their own…

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 fairness in the context of feature-based price discrimination in monopoly markets. We propose a new notion of individual fairness, namely, \alpha-fairness, which guarantees that individuals with similar features face similar…

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…

Problem definition: We study a data-driven pricing problem in which a seller sets a price for a single item based on demand observed at a limited number of historical prices. Our goal is to quantify the value of such information and to…