Related papers: Fair Commodity Taxation
Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…
Incorporating fairness criteria in optimization problems comes at a certain cost, which is measured by the so-called price of fairness. Here we consider the allocation of indivisible goods. For envy-freeness as fairness criterion it is…
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…
We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…
We consider the age-old problem of allocating items among different agents in a way that is efficient and fair. Two papers, by Dolev et al. and Ghodsi et al., have recently studied this problem in the context of computer systems. Both…
Does greater connectivity enhance the value of public information? I study a networked beauty contest game where agents balance adaptation to the fundamental with local coordination. The analysis reveals a stark non-monotonicity: while…
Statistical algorithms are usually helping in making decisions in many aspects of our lives. But, how do we know if these algorithms are biased and commit unfair discrimination of a particular group of people, typically a minority?…
In many markets, like electricity or cloud computing markets, providers incur large costs for keeping sufficient capacity in reserve to accommodate demand fluctuations of a mostly fixed user base. These costs are significantly affected by…
We study the effects of data sharing between firms on prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Although indiscriminate sharing of consumer data decreases firm profits due to the subsequent increase in competition, selective sharing can be…
Fairness is an important performance criterion in all resource allocation schemes, including those in distributed computer systems. However, it is often specified only qualitatively. The quantitative measures proposed in the literature are…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
We study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough.…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
Organizations that own data face increasing legal liability for its discriminatory use against protected demographic groups, extending to contractual transactions involving third parties access and use of the data. This is problematic,…
Resource allocation problems are a fundamental domain in which to evaluate the fairness properties of algorithms. The trade-offs between fairness and utilization have a long history in this domain. A recent line of work has considered…
There is increasing regulatory interest in whether machine learning algorithms deployed in consequential domains (e.g. in criminal justice) treat different demographic groups "fairly." However, there are several proposed notions of…
We consider item allocation to individual agents who have additive valuations, in settings in which there are protected groups, and the allocation needs to give each protected group its "fair" share of the total welfare. Informally, within…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget (bids) among multiple machines…