We consider a principal who periodically offers a fixed, binary, and costly non-monetary reward to agents endowed with private information, to incentivize the agents to invest effort over the long run. An agent's output, as a function of his effort, is a priori uncertain and is worth a fixed...

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,...

Motivated by the ever-growing complexity of projects and the consistent trend of outsourcing of individual tasks or components, we study the contract-design problem faced by a firm (or organization) for executing a project consisting of multiple tasks, each of which is performed by an individual...

Descending mechanisms for procurement (or, ascending mechanisms for selling) have been well‐recognized for their simplicity from the viewpoint of bidders — they require less bidder sophistication as compared to sealed‐bid mechanisms. In this study, we consider procurement under each of two...

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...

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...