In the mobile advertising ecosystem, the role of ad-exchanges to match advertisers and publishers has grown significantly over the past few years. At a mobile ad-exchange, impressions (i.e., opportunities to display ads) are sold to advertisers in real time through an auction mechanism. The...

We consider an ad-firm that acts on behalf of advertisers to execute mobile, in-app, ad campaigns. The firm commits to provide an advertiser a specified number of ad placements (impressions) on mobile apps, usually in a specified location, and within a specified time horizon. The supply for ad...

Users who have an ad-blocker installed present a genuine predicament for a website (a.k.a. publisher): On the one hand, these users do not generate revenue for the website; on the other hand, denying them access can shrink the user base and adversely affect the popularity of the website,...

Dairy cooperatives bestow upon farmers the virtues of controlling a large supply quantity of a relatively scarce product, i.e., milk (e.g., higher bargaining power, fixed cost sharing, etc.). However, the cooperative structure also encourages individual farmers to free-ride (i.e., provide...

The wide variety of pricing policies used in practice by data-sellers suggests that there are significant challenges in pricing datasets. In this paper, we develop a utility framework that is appropriate for data-buyers and the corresponding pricing of the data by the data-seller. A buyer...

Input distortion is a common problem faced by expert systems, particularly those deployed with a Web interface. In this study, we develop novel methods to distinguish liars from truth-tellers, and redesign rule-based expert systems to address such a problem. The four proposed methods are termed...