Related papers: Screening in digital monopolies
A welfare-maximizing designer allocates two kinds of goods using two wasteful screening instruments: ordeals, which enter agents' utilities additively, and damages, which harm agents in proportion to their values for the goods. If agents…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…
In this paper, we ask the question of why the quality of commercial software, in terms of security and safety, does not measure up to that of other (durable) consumer goods we have come to expect. We examine this question through the lens…
A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
The software industry is successful, if it can draw the complete attention of the customers towards it. This is achievable if the organization can produce a high quality product. To identify a product to be of high quality, it should be…
Social media are massive marketplaces where ideas and news compete for our attention. Previous studies have shown that quality is not a necessary condition for online virality and that knowledge about peer choices can distort the…
Dworczak et al. (2021) study when certain market structures are optimal in the presence of heterogeneous preferences. A key assumption is that the social planner knows the joint distribution of the value of the good and marginal value of…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…
Behavioural economists have shown that people are often averse to inequality and will make choices to avoid unequal outcomes. In this paper, we consider how to allocate indivisible goods fairly so as to minimize inequality. We consider how…
This paper studies an online replication problem for distributed data access. The goal is to dynamically create and delete data copies in a multi-server system as time passes to minimize the total storage and network cost of serving access…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to agents in an online setting, where goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated irrevocably. Focusing on the popular fairness notions of envy-freeness, proportionality, and…
We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique…
Peer produced goods such as online knowledge bases and free/libre open source software rely on contributors who often choose their tasks regardless of consumer needs. These goods are susceptible to underproduction: when popular goods are…
According to common understanding, in free completion of a private product, market and price, the two main factors in the competition that leads to economic efficiency, always exist together. This paper, however, points out the phenomenon…
The emergence of the branded recommerce channel - digitally enabled and branded marketplaces that facilitate purchasing pre-owned items directly from a manufacturer's e-commerce site - leads to new variants of classic IS and economic…
Quality control plays a critical role in crowdsourcing. The state-of-the-art work is not suitable for large-scale crowdsourcing applications, since it is a long haul for the requestor to verify task quality or select professional workers in…
We consider a monopolistic seller in a market that may be segmented. The surplus of each consumer in a segment depends on the price that the seller optimally charges, which depends on the set of consumers in the segment. We study which…