Jia et al. study the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on technology venture inve... more Jia et al. study the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on technology venture investment in the European Union.
This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical ... more This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the trade-offs associated with the privacy and the sharing of personal data. We highlight how the economic analysis of privacy evolved over time, as advancements in information technology raised increasingly nuanced and complex issues. We find and highlight three themes that connect diverse insights from the literature. First, characterizing a single unifying economic theory of privacy is hard, because privacy issues of economic relevance arise in widely diverse contexts. Second, there are theoretical and empirical situations where the protection of privacy can both enhance and detract from individual and societal welfare. Third, in digital economies, consumers' ability to make informed dec...
Proceedings of the 23rd National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Volume 1, 2008
One way for agents to reach a joint decision is to vote over the alternatives. In open, anonymous... more One way for agents to reach a joint decision is to vote over the alternatives. In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, an agent can vote more than once without being detected. A voting rule is false-name-proof if no agent ever benefits from casting additional votes. Previous work has shown that all false-name-proof voting rules are unresponsive to agents' preferences. However, that work implicitly assumes that casting additional votes is costless. In this paper, we consider what happens if there is a cost to casting additional votes. We characterize the optimal (most responsive) false-name-proofwith-costs voting rule for 2 alternatives. In sharp contrast to the costless setting, we prove that as the voting population grows larger, the probability that this rule selects the majority winner converges to 1. We also characterize the optimal group false-name-proof rule for 2 alternatives, which is robust to coalitions of agents sharing the costs of additional votes. Unfortunately, the probability that this rule chooses the majority winner as the voting population grows larger is relatively low. We derive an analogous rule in a setting with 3 alternatives, and provide bounding results and computational approaches for settings with 4 or more alternatives.
ABSTRACT Large-scale knowledge sharing has become a ubiquitous online phenomenon. Such on-line re... more ABSTRACT Large-scale knowledge sharing has become a ubiquitous online phenomenon. Such on-line repositories and question-answering forums are often dependent on volunteer users for the provision of informational content. This paper examines a rich dataset of user contributions to study user motivation and the effects of multitasking on user performance. We find that most users on the Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) forum we study behave in a manner consistent with the incentive to win contests rather than to make public-good contributions. We also find that for those users who are relatively more contest-motivated, multitasking across subject categories is associated with lower levels of performance, and more so when answering activities are spread over time.
In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, agents can participate in a mechanism multiple ... more In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, agents can participate in a mechanism multiple times under different identities. A mechanism is false-name-proof if no agent ever benefits from participating more than once. Unfortunately, the design of falsename-proof mechanisms has been hindered by a variety of negative results. In this paper, we show how some of these negative results can be circumvented by making the realistic assumption that obtaining additional identities comes at a (potentially small) cost. In doing so, we aim to establish the fundamentals of a general theory of falsename-proof mechanisms where identifiers are costly. We study a variety of mechanism design settings under several cost models, and we prove revelation principles and limit results.
ABSTRACT We model an employee's decision to pursue an innovative idea at his employing fi... more ABSTRACT We model an employee's decision to pursue an innovative idea at his employing firm (internally) or as a start-up (externally). We characterize an idea by its market profitability and the degree of positive/negative externality that it imposes on the employing firm's profits. The innovation process consists of exploration and development. Exploring an idea internally grants the employee access to exploration support provided by the firm, but reduces his appropriability of the idea. We demonstrate that ideas exhibiting weak ex-ternalities are explored and developed externally whereas ideas with strong externalities are explored and handled internally. Moderate externalities are associated with internal exploration, but subsequent external development. An increase in the firm's exploration support attracts internal exploration of a wider range of ideas, but may increase the likelihood of subsequent external development. We further show that while the optimal level of exploration support rises with the firm's innovation appropriability, overall profits may decline.
Jia et al. study the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on technology venture inve... more Jia et al. study the effects of the General Data Protection Regulation on technology venture investment in the European Union.
This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical ... more This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the trade-offs associated with the privacy and the sharing of personal data. We highlight how the economic analysis of privacy evolved over time, as advancements in information technology raised increasingly nuanced and complex issues. We find and highlight three themes that connect diverse insights from the literature. First, characterizing a single unifying economic theory of privacy is hard, because privacy issues of economic relevance arise in widely diverse contexts. Second, there are theoretical and empirical situations where the protection of privacy can both enhance and detract from individual and societal welfare. Third, in digital economies, consumers' ability to make informed dec...
Proceedings of the 23rd National Conference on Artificial Intelligence Volume 1, 2008
One way for agents to reach a joint decision is to vote over the alternatives. In open, anonymous... more One way for agents to reach a joint decision is to vote over the alternatives. In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, an agent can vote more than once without being detected. A voting rule is false-name-proof if no agent ever benefits from casting additional votes. Previous work has shown that all false-name-proof voting rules are unresponsive to agents' preferences. However, that work implicitly assumes that casting additional votes is costless. In this paper, we consider what happens if there is a cost to casting additional votes. We characterize the optimal (most responsive) false-name-proofwith-costs voting rule for 2 alternatives. In sharp contrast to the costless setting, we prove that as the voting population grows larger, the probability that this rule selects the majority winner converges to 1. We also characterize the optimal group false-name-proof rule for 2 alternatives, which is robust to coalitions of agents sharing the costs of additional votes. Unfortunately, the probability that this rule chooses the majority winner as the voting population grows larger is relatively low. We derive an analogous rule in a setting with 3 alternatives, and provide bounding results and computational approaches for settings with 4 or more alternatives.
ABSTRACT Large-scale knowledge sharing has become a ubiquitous online phenomenon. Such on-line re... more ABSTRACT Large-scale knowledge sharing has become a ubiquitous online phenomenon. Such on-line repositories and question-answering forums are often dependent on volunteer users for the provision of informational content. This paper examines a rich dataset of user contributions to study user motivation and the effects of multitasking on user performance. We find that most users on the Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) forum we study behave in a manner consistent with the incentive to win contests rather than to make public-good contributions. We also find that for those users who are relatively more contest-motivated, multitasking across subject categories is associated with lower levels of performance, and more so when answering activities are spread over time.
In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, agents can participate in a mechanism multiple ... more In open, anonymous settings such as the Internet, agents can participate in a mechanism multiple times under different identities. A mechanism is false-name-proof if no agent ever benefits from participating more than once. Unfortunately, the design of falsename-proof mechanisms has been hindered by a variety of negative results. In this paper, we show how some of these negative results can be circumvented by making the realistic assumption that obtaining additional identities comes at a (potentially small) cost. In doing so, we aim to establish the fundamentals of a general theory of falsename-proof mechanisms where identifiers are costly. We study a variety of mechanism design settings under several cost models, and we prove revelation principles and limit results.
ABSTRACT We model an employee's decision to pursue an innovative idea at his employing fi... more ABSTRACT We model an employee's decision to pursue an innovative idea at his employing firm (internally) or as a start-up (externally). We characterize an idea by its market profitability and the degree of positive/negative externality that it imposes on the employing firm's profits. The innovation process consists of exploration and development. Exploring an idea internally grants the employee access to exploration support provided by the firm, but reduces his appropriability of the idea. We demonstrate that ideas exhibiting weak ex-ternalities are explored and developed externally whereas ideas with strong externalities are explored and handled internally. Moderate externalities are associated with internal exploration, but subsequent external development. An increase in the firm's exploration support attracts internal exploration of a wider range of ideas, but may increase the likelihood of subsequent external development. We further show that while the optimal level of exploration support rises with the firm's innovation appropriability, overall profits may decline.
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Papers by Liad Wagman