5 papers
On the Optimality of Mental Accounting
Jarrod Burgh, Emerson Melo, Matthew Shum
Mental accounting is usually explained by self-control, and two-stage budgeting by separable preferences. We propose a third explanation based on sellers' market power. A consumer…
One-Shot Pricing for Hands-Off-the-Wheel Advertising Markets
Emerson Melo, Matt Shum, Rakesh Vohra
Per-impression auctions have long served as the allocation mechanism in online advertising. We argue that in ``hands-off-the-wheel'' (HOTW) markets, where advertisers declare budge…
Welfare at Risk: Distributionally Robust Bounds for Policy Evaluation
Costas Lambros, Emerson Melo
This paper develops a framework to study how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are not directly observed. We bound t…
Beyond Softmax: A New Perspective on Gradient Bandits
Emerson Melo, David Müller
We establish a link between a class of discrete choice models and the theory of online learning and multi-armed bandits. Our contributions are: (i) sublinear regret bounds for a br…
Discrete Choice Multi-Armed Bandits
Emerson Melo, David Müller
This paper establishes a connection between a category of discrete choice models and the realms of online learning and multiarmed bandit algorithms. Our contributions can be summar…