Related papers: Subsidizing Sequential Search
A defining feature of digital goods is that replication and degradation are costless: once a high-quality good is produced, low-quality versions can be created and distributed at no additional cost. This paper studies quality-based…
Fairness in advertising is a topic of particular concern motivated by theoretical and empirical observations in both the computer science and economics literature. We examine the problem of fairness in advertising for general purpose…
This paper presents the Sequential Rationality Hypothesis, which argues that consumers are better able to make utility-maximizing decisions when products appear in sequential pairwise comparisons rather than in simultaneous multi-option…
We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…
In consumer search, there is a set of items. An agent has a prior over her value for each item and can pay a cost to learn the instantiation of her value. After exploring a subset of items, the agent chooses one and obtains a payoff equal…
Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…
We explore the fundamental problem of sorting through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms, where algorithms can leverage possibly erroneous predictions to improve their efficiency. We consider two different settings: In the first…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
We study optimal monopoly pricing over consumer networks governed by general nonlinear utilities. In our framework, a consumer's utility is jointly determined by an individualized price and the consumption choices of their peers, propagated…
Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…
The paper explores a consumer search setting where the sellers have asymmetries. The model is an extension of the popular Stahl Model, which is widely used in the literature. The extension introduces sellers with heterogeneous stores…
Machine learning models play a key role for service providers looking to gain market share in consumer markets. However, traditional learning approaches do not take into account the existence of additional providers, who compete with each…
A user faces a list returned by a search system, ordered by a noisy proxy for relevance, and decides sequentially whether to pay a fixed cost to inspect another item or stop with the best she has uncovered. She does not enter the page…
When designing product rankings, online retailers and platforms choose which outcome to maximize: revenues from commissions or markups, the number of transactions, or consumer welfare. These objectives need not align, creating potential…
Dynamic, risk-based pricing can systematically exclude vulnerable consumer groups from essential resources such as health insurance and consumer credit. We show that a regulator can realign private incentives with social objectives through…
We analyze a reversed-supervision strategy that searches over labelings of a large unlabeled set \(B\) to minimize error on a small labeled set \(A\). The search space is \(2^n\), and the resulting complexity remains exponential even under…
In many online platforms, customers' decisions are substantially influenced by product rankings as most customers only examine a few top-ranked products. Concurrently, such platforms also use the same data corresponding to customers'…
An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…
Traditionally, recommender systems operate by returning a user a set of items, ranked in order of estimated relevance to that user. In recent years, methods relying on stochastic ordering have been developed to create "fairer" rankings that…