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We consider a monopoly information holder selling information to a budget-constrained decision maker, who may benefit from the sellers information. The decision maker has a utility function that depends on his action and an uncertain state of the world. The seller and the buyer each observe a private signal regarding the state of the world, which may be correlated with each other. The sellers goal is to sell her private information to the buyer and extract maximum possible revenue, subject to the buyers budget constraints. We consider three different settings with increasing generality, i.e., the sellers signal and the buyers signal can be independent, correlated, or follow a general distribution accessed through a black-box sampling oracle. For each setting, we design information selling mechanisms which are both optimal and simple in the sense that they can be naturally interpreted, have succinct representations, and can be efficiently computed. Notably, though the optimal mechanism exhibits slightly increasing complexity as the setting becomes more general, all our mechanisms share the same format of acting as a consultant who recommends the best action to the buyer but uses different and carefully designed payment rules for different settings. Each of our optimal mechanisms can be easily computed by solving a single polynomial-size linear program. This significantly simplifies exponential-size LPs solved by the Ellipsoid method in the previous work, which computes the optimal mechanisms in the same setting but without budget limit. Such simplification is enabled by our new characterizations of the optimal mechanism in the (more realistic) budget-constrained setting.
We consider a price competition between two sellers of perfect-complement goods. Each seller posts a price for the good it sells, but the demand is determined according to the sum of prices. This is a classic model by Cournot (1838), who showed that
We study the dynamic pricing problem faced by a monopolistic retailer who sells a storable product to forward-looking consumers. In this framework, the two major pricing policies (or mechanisms) studied in the literature are the preannounced (commitm
We consider the model of the data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has private valuation for the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct her own
A decision-maker is deciding between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyers private type and also an unknown state of nature. An information seller c
When selling information products, the seller can provide some free partial information to change peoples valuations so that the overall revenue can possibly be increased. We study the general problem of advertising information products by revealing