research-article

Two-sided search with experts

Authors:

Onn ShehoryAuthors Info & Claims

EC '12: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

Pages 754 - 771

https://doi.org/10.1145/2229012.2229070

Published: 04 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we study distributed agent matching in environments characterized by uncertain signals, costly exploration, and the presence of an information broker. Each agent receives information about the potential value of matching with others. This information signal may, however be noisy, and the agent incurs some cost in receiving it. If all candidate agents agree to the matching the team is formed and each agent receives the true unknown utility of the matching, and leaves the market. We consider the effect of the presence of information brokers, or experts, on the outcomes of such matching processes. Experts can, upon payment of a fee, perform the service of disambiguating noisy signals and revealing the true value of a match to any agent. We analyze equilibrium behavior given the fee set by a monopolist expert and use this analysis to derive the revenue maximizing strategy for the expert as the first mover in a Stackelberg game. Surprisingly, we find that better information can hurt: the presence of the expert, even if the use of its services is optional, can degrade both individual agents' utilities and overall social welfare. While in one-sided search the presence of the expert can only help, in two-sided (and general k-sided) search the externality imposed by the fact that others are consulting the expert can lead to a situation where the equilibrium outcome is that everyone consults the expert, even though all agents would be better off if the expert were not present. As an antidote, we show how market designers can enhance welfare by taxing use of expert services.

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Cited By

Sarne DAumann Y(2018)Exploration costs as a means for improving performance in multiagent systemsAnnals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence10.1007/s10472-014-9435-572:3-4(297-329)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10472-014-9435-5
Alkoby SSarne DMilchtaich ISingh SMarkovitch S(2017)Strategic signaling and free information disclosure in auctionsProceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3298239.3298289(319-327)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3298239.3298289
Alkoby SSarne D(2017)Strategic Free Information Disclosure for a Vickrey AuctionAgent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets10.1007/978-3-319-54229-4_1(1-18)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54229-4_1
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Two-sided search with experts
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Economics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EC '12: Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

June 2012

1016 pages

ISBN:9781450314152

DOI:10.1145/2229012

General Chair:
Boi Faltings
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
,
Program Chairs:
Kevin Leyton-Brown
University of British Columbia
,
Panos Ipeirotis
New York University

Copyright © 2012 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 June 2012

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EC '12: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

June 4 - 8, 2012

Valencia, Spain

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Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Sarne DAumann Y(2018)Exploration costs as a means for improving performance in multiagent systemsAnnals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence10.1007/s10472-014-9435-572:3-4(297-329)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10472-014-9435-5
Alkoby SSarne DMilchtaich ISingh SMarkovitch S(2017)Strategic signaling and free information disclosure in auctionsProceedings of the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3298239.3298289(319-327)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3298239.3298289
Alkoby SSarne D(2017)Strategic Free Information Disclosure for a Vickrey AuctionAgent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Designing Trading Strategies and Mechanisms for Electronic Markets10.1007/978-3-319-54229-4_1(1-18)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54229-4_1
Alkoby SSarne DDas SWeiss GYolum PBordini RElkind E(2015)Strategic Free Information Disclosure for Search-Based Information PlatformsProceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/2772879.2773236(635-643)Online publication date: 4-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2772879.2773236
Das SKamenica E(2015)Representations of information structures2015 53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton)10.1109/ALLERTON.2015.7447079(737-743)Online publication date: Sep-2015
https://doi.org/10.1109/ALLERTON.2015.7447079
Hajaj CSarne DBabaioff MConitzer VEasley D(2014)Strategic information platformsProceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation10.1145/2600057.2602864(839-856)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2600057.2602864

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