Title
Segmenting Two-Sided Markets.
Abstract
Recent years have witnessed the rise of many successful e-commerce marketplace platforms like the Amazon marketplace, AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, and Upwork, where a central platform mediates economic transactions between buyers and sellers. A common feature of many of these two-sided marketplaces is that the platform has full control over search and discovery, but prices are determined by the buyers and sellers. Motivated by this, we study the algorithmic aspects of market segmentation via directed discovery in two-sided markets with endogenous prices. We consider a model where an online platform knows each buyer/seller's characteristics, and associated demand/supply elasticities. Moreover, the platform can use discovery mechanisms (search, recommendation, etc.) to control which buyers/sellers are visible to each other. We develop efficient algorithms for throughput (i.e. volume of trade) and welfare maximization with provable guarantees under a variety of assumptions on the demand and supply functions. We also test the validity of our assumptions on demand curves inferred from NYC taxicab log-data, as well as show the performance of our algorithms on synthetic experiments.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3038912.3052578
WWW
Keywords
DocType
Volume
directed discovery, market design, market segmentation, online markets
Journal
16
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
1
1
0.36
References 
Authors
4
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Siddhartha Banerjee118522.85
Sreenivas Gollapudi2119864.70
Kostas Kollias366.18
Kamesh Munagala41989129.87