An Economic Response to Unsolicited Communication

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

We explore a novel approach to spam based on economic rather than technological or regulatory screening mechanisms. Our first point is that mechanisms designed to promote valuable communication can often outperform those designed merely to block wasteful communication. Our second is to shift focus from the information in the message to the information known to the sender. We can then use principles of information asymmetry to cause people who knowingly misuse communication to incur higher costs than those who do not. In certain cases, though not all, we can show this approach leaves recipients better off than even an idealized or "perfect" filter that costs nothing and makes no mistakes. Our mechanism also accounts for individual differences in opportunity costs, and allows for bi-directional wealth transfers while facilitating both sender signaling and recipient screening. 1

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013

We study persuasion in a modified Crawford-Sobel sender-receiver game in which the receiver makes a binary decision to accept or reject a good recommended by the sender. The good's quality and the sender's type (neutral or biased) are not observable to the receiver. These slight alterations yield a simple model with a unique equilibrium in which neutral senders fully separate. The neutral sender can only communicate low quality levels with precision and the biased sender adopts a mixed strategy that on average can successfully persuade the receiver to accept the good. This strategy is robust under competition between multiple senders. We provide a sufficient condition for the receiver to prefer this equilibrium to delegating decision-making authority to a sender of unknown type. Several less-informative equilibria exist; however, only announcement-proof equilibria are outcome-equivalent to the truth-telling equilibrium.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014

IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2000

This paper studies the interaction between a designer and a group of strategic and self-interested users who possess information the designer does not have. Because the users are strategic and self-interested, they will act to their own advantage, which will often be different from the interest of the designer, even if the latter is benevolent and seeks to maximize (some measure of) social welfare. In the settings we consider, the designer and the users can communicate (perhaps with noise), the designer can observe the actions of the users (perhaps with error) and the designer can commit to (plans of) actionsinterventions -of its own. The designer's problem is to construct and implement a mechanism that provides incentives for the users to communicate and act in such a way as to further the interest of the designer despite the fact that they are strategic and self-interested and possess private information. To address the designer's problem we propose a general and flexible framework that applies to many scenarios. To illustrate the usefulness of this framework, we discuss some simple examples, leaving further applications to other papers. In an important class of environments, we find conditions under which the designer can obtain its benchmark optimumthe utility that could be obtained if it had all information and could command the actions of the users -and conditions under which it cannot. More broadly we are able to characterize the solution to the designer's problem, even when it does not yield the benchmark optimum. Because the optimal mechanism may be difficult to construct and implement, we also propose a simpler and more readily implemented mechanism that, while falling short of the optimum, still yields the designer a "good" result.

This study is an attempt to determine how much individuals should invest in social communication, depending on the type of relationships they may form. Two simple models of social relationships are considered. In both models, individuals emit costly signals to advertise their “quality” as potential friends. Relationships are asymmetrical or symmetrical. In the asymmetrical condition (first model), we observe that low-quality individuals are discouraged from signaling. In the symmetrical condition (second model), all individuals invest in communication. In both models, high-quality individuals (“elite”) do not compete and signal uniformly. The level of this uniform signal and the size of the “elite” turn out to be controlled by the accuracy of signals. The two models may be relevant to several aspects of animal and human social communication.

2014

This paper is about costly and truthful communication. I show that in a situation where a sender tries to convince a receiver to accept a project, the receiver's communication objective and effort depend on whether the receiver would reject or accept the project without any communication. If without communication the receiver would reject the project, his communication objective is to identify and accept a high quality project. His effort depends positively on his gain of accepting a high quality project. If without communication the receiver would accept the project, his communication objective is to identify and reject a low quality project. His effort depends positively on his loss from accepting a low quality project.

OEconomia, 2015

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information about a public health insurance programme.

Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 2005

Common goods are notoriously vulnerable to destructive overuse. Indeed, certain online activities, such as spam, can jeopardize the very existence of the Internet. We defend an account of the net as a common good which provides the grounds for assessing various strategies for spam reduction. Common goods abound in digital culture, from open-source software (both Operating

2025

This paper proposes the Attention-Centric Object-Oriented Economic System (AC-OOES), a new framework for facilitating economic exchange of goods and services in the digital age. Building on the theoretical foundations of Object-Oriented Economics [?] and inspired by Adam Smith's seminal work [?], we argue that a networked economy-driven by tokenized attention-offers a superior alternative to traditional systems such as capitalism and communism. We model agents as nodes in a dynamic network, where the value generated is a function of connectivity and messaging interactions. We develop economic mathematics and game-theoretic reasoning to show that reinvesting attention to boost network connectivity results in super-linear growth, increased aggregate GDP, and near-perfect equity. Finally, we propose a practical roadmap for implementing this system using decentralized digital platforms.