12 research outputs found
Pricing in Social Networks with Negative Externalities
We study the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are
embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the
seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller
posts a price not greater than their values of the product. The product's value
for a consumer is determined by two factors: a fixed consumer-specified
intrinsic value and a variable externality that is exerted from the consumer's
neighbors in a linear way. We study the scenario of negative externalities,
which captures many interesting situations, but is much less understood in
comparison with its positive externality counterpart. We assume complete
information about the network, consumers' intrinsic values, and the negative
externalities. The maximum revenue is in general achieved by iterative pricing,
which offers impatient consumers a sequence of prices over time.
We prove that it is NP-hard to find an optimal iterative pricing, even for
unweighted tree networks with uniform intrinsic values. Complementary to the
hardness result, we design a 2-approximation algorithm for finding iterative
pricing in general weighted networks with (possibly) nonuniform intrinsic
values. We show that, as an approximation to optimal iterative pricing, single
pricing can work rather well for many interesting cases, but theoretically it
can behave arbitrarily bad
Selling a Single Item with Negative Externalities
We consider the problem of regulating products with negative externalities to
a third party that is neither the buyer nor the seller, but where both the
buyer and seller can take steps to mitigate the externality. The motivating
example to have in mind is the sale of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, many
of which have historically been compromised for DDoS attacks that disrupted
Internet-wide services such as Twitter. Neither the buyer (i.e., consumers) nor
seller (i.e., IoT manufacturers) was known to suffer from the attack, but both
have the power to expend effort to secure their devices. We consider a
regulator who regulates payments (via fines if the device is compromised, or
market prices directly), or the product directly via mandatory security
requirements.
Both regulations come at a cost---implementing security requirements
increases production costs, and the existence of fines decreases consumers'
values---thereby reducing the seller's profits. The focus of this paper is to
understand the \emph{efficiency} of various regulatory policies. That is,
policy A is more efficient than policy B if A more successfully minimizes
negatives externalities, while both A and B reduce seller's profits equally.
We develop a simple model to capture the impact of regulatory policies on a
buyer's behavior. {In this model, we show that for \textit{homogeneous}
markets---where the buyer's ability to follow security practices is always high
or always low---the optimal (externality-minimizing for a given profit
constraint) regulatory policy need regulate \emph{only} payments \emph{or}
production.} In arbitrary markets, by contrast, we show that while the optimal
policy may require regulating both aspects, there is always an approximately
optimal policy which regulates just one
Maximizing Social Welfare Subject to Network Externalities: A Unifying Submodular Optimization Approach
We consider the problem of allocating multiple indivisible items to a set of
networked agents to maximize the social welfare subject to network
externalities. Here, the social welfare is given by the sum of agents'
utilities and externalities capture the effect that one user of an item has on
the item's value to others. We first provide a general formulation that
captures some of the existing models as a special case. We then show that the
social welfare maximization problem benefits some nice diminishing or
increasing marginal return properties. That allows us to devise polynomial-time
approximation algorithms using the Lovasz extension and multilinear extension
of the objective functions. Our principled approach recovers or improves some
of the existing algorithms and provides a simple and unifying framework for
maximizing social welfare subject to network externalities
Pricing Public Goods for Private Sale
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a
good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other
individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not
only to the household that buys it, but also to others on the same street.
Given that the seller is constrained to selling such a (locally) public good
via individual private sales, how should he set his prices given the
distribution of values held by the agents?
We study this problem as a two-stage game. In the first stage, the seller
chooses and announces a price for the product. In the second stage, the agents
(each having a private value for the good) decide simultaneously whether or not
they will buy the product. In the resulting game, which can exhibit a
multiplicity of equilibria, agents must strategize about whether they will
themselves purchase the good to receive its benefits.
In the case of a fully public good (where all agents benefit whenever any
agent purchases), we describe a pricing mechanism that is approximately
revenue-optimal (up to a constant factor) when values are drawn from a regular
distribution. We then study settings in which the good is only "locally"
public: agents are arranged in a network and share benefits only with their
neighbors. We describe a pricing method that approximately maximizes revenue,
in the worst case over equilibria of agent behavior, for any -regular
network. Finally, we show that approximately optimal prices can be found for
general networks in the special case that private values are drawn from a
uniform distribution. We also discuss some barriers to extending these results
to general networks and regular distributions.Comment: accepted to EC'1
Towards Data Auctions with Externalities
The design of data markets has gained importance as firms increasingly use
predictions from machine learning models to streamline operations, yet need to
externally acquire training data to fit such models. One aspect that has
received limited consideration is the externality a firm faces when data is
allocated to competing firms. Such externalities couple firms' optimal
allocations, despite the inherent free replicability of data. In this paper, we
demonstrate that the presence of externalities increases the optimal revenue of
a monopolistic data seller by letting firms pay to prevent allocations to other
competing firms. This is shown by first reducing the combinatorial problem of
allocating and pricing multiple datasets to the auction of a single digital
good. We achieve this by modeling utility for data solely through the increase
in prediction accuracy it provides. Then, we find the welfare and revenue
maximizing mechanisms, highlighting how the forms of firms' private information
- whether they know the externalities they exert on others or vice-versa -
affects their overall structures. In all cases, the optimal allocation rule is
a single threshold (one per firm), where either all data is allocated or none
is
Modeling consumer behaviour in the presence of network effects
Consumer choice models are a key component in fields such as Revenue Management and Transport Logistics, where the demands for certain products or services are assumed to follow a particular form, and sellers or market-makers use that information to adjust their strategies accordingly, choosing for example which products to display (assortment problem) or their prices (pricing problem).
In the last couple of decades, online markets have taken a lot of relevance, providing a setting where consumers can compare easily different products, before deciding to buy them. More information is now available, and the purchasing decisions not only depend on the quality, prices and availability of the products, but also on what previous consumers think about them (phenomenon commonly known as Network Effects). Hence, in order to create a suitable model for this kind of market, it is relevant to understand how the collective decisions affect the market evolution.
In this thesis we consider a particular subset of those online markets, cultural markets, where the products are for example songs, video games or ebooks. This kind of market has the special feature that its products have unlimited supply (since they are just a digital copy), and therefore we can exploit this in our models, to justify assumptions of the asymptotic behaviour of the market.
We study some variations of the traditional Multinomial Logit (MNL) model, characterising the behaviour of consumers, where their purchasing decisions are affected by the quality and prices (initially fixed) of the available products, as well as their visibilities in the market interface and the consumption patterns of previous users. We focus particularly on the parameters associated to the network effects, where depending on the strength of the network effects, it is possible to explain: herd behaviours, where an alternative overpowers the rest; as well as more well-distributed settings, where all the alternatives receive enough attention giving a notion of fairness, since higher quality products get a larger market share.
Finally, using the model where market shares are distributed according to the quality of the products, we study pricing strategies, where sellers can either collaborate or compete. We analyse the effect of both type of strategies into the choice model