Related papers: Subsidizing Sequential Search
We investigate market forces that would lead to the emergence of new classes of players in the sponsored search market. We report a 3-fold diversification triggered by two inherent features of the sponsored search market, namely, capacity…
We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is…
The top search results matching a user query that are displayed on the first page are critical to the effectiveness and perception of a search system. A search ranking system typically orders the results by independent query-document scores…
Traditional approaches to ranking in web search follow the paradigm of rank-by-score: a learned function gives each query-URL combination an absolute score and URLs are ranked according to this score. This paradigm ensures that if the score…
We study equilibria of markets with $m$ heterogeneous indivisible goods and $n$ consumers with combinatorial preferences. It is well known that a competitive equilibrium is not guaranteed to exist when valuations are not gross substitutes.…
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…
The sorting and filtering capabilities offered by modern e-commerce platforms significantly impact customers' purchase decisions, as well as the resulting prices set by competing sellers on these platforms. Motivated by this practical…
A number of applications involve sequential arrival of users, and require showing each user an ordering of items. A prime example (which forms the focus of this paper) is the bidding process in conference peer review where reviewers enter…
We describe a seriation algorithm for ranking a set of items given pairwise comparisons between these items. Intuitively, the algorithm assigns similar rankings to items that compare similarly with all others. It does so by constructing a…
Traditional ranking systems are expected to sort items in the order of their relevance and thereby maximize their utility. In fair ranking, utility is complemented with fairness as an optimization goal. Recent work on fair ranking focuses…
Consumers only discover at the first seller which product best fits their needs, then check its price online, then decide on buying. Switching sellers is costly. Equilibrium prices fall in the switching cost, eventually to the monopoly…
Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine…
Sponsored search mechanisms have drawn much attention from both academic community and industry in recent years since the seminal papers of [13] and [14]. However, most of the existing literature concentrates on the mechanism design and…
A seller is pricing identical copies of a good to a stream of unit-demand buyers. Each buyer has a value on the good as his private information. The seller only knows the empirical value distribution of the buyer population and chooses the…
This paper explores the integration of strategic optimization methods in search advertising, focusing on ad ranking and bidding mechanisms within E-commerce platforms. By employing a combination of reinforcement learning and evolutionary…
Rankings of people and items are at the heart of selection-making, match-making, and recommender systems, ranging from employment sites to sharing economy platforms. As ranking positions influence the amount of attention the ranked subjects…
In light of Phillips' contention regarding the impracticality of Search Neutrality, asserting that non-epistemic factors presently dictate result prioritization, our objective in this study is to confront this constraint by questioning…
This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an…
Machine learning-driven rankings, where individuals (or items) are ranked in response to a query, mediate search exposure or attention in a variety of safety-critical settings. Thus, it is important to ensure that such rankings are fair.…
Online marketplaces frequently run pricing experiments in environments where users choose from a list of items. In these settings, items compete for users' limited attention and demand, creating interference among items within a list:…