Ali Makhdoumi

Journal Article Operations Research · May 1, 2024 We consider a platform’s problem of collecting data from privacy sensitive users to estimate an underlying parameter of interest. We formulate this question as a Bayesian-optimal mechanism design problem, in which an individual can share their (verifiable) ... Full text Cite

Testing, Voluntary Social Distancing, and the Spread of an Infection

Journal Article Operations Research · March 1, 2024 We study the effects of testing policy on voluntary social distancing and the spread of an infection. Agents decide their social activity level, which determines a social network over which the virus spreads. Testing enables the isolation of infected indiv ... Full text Cite

Optimal Subscription Planning for Digital Goods

Journal Article Operations Research · November 1, 2023 We consider a media service provider that gives users access to digital goods through subscription. In our model, different types of users with heterogeneous usage rates repeatedly use a platform over a period of time. There are multiple item types on the ... Full text Cite

Providing Data Samples for Free

Journal Article Management Science · June 1, 2023 We consider the problem of a seller of data who sells information to a buyer regarding an unknown (to both parties) state of the world. Traditionally, the literature explores one-round strategies for selling information because of the seller’s holdup probl ... Full text Cite

Revenue-Sharing Allocation Strategies for Two-Sided Media Platforms: Pro-Rata vs. User-Centric

Journal Article Management Science · December 1, 2022 We consider a two-sided streaming service platform that generates revenues by charging users a subscription fee for unlimited access to the content and compensates content providers (artists) through a revenue-sharing allocation rule. Platform users are he ... Full text Cite

Learning From Reviews: The Selection Effect and the Speed of Learning

Journal Article Econometrica · November 1, 2022 This paper develops a model of Bayesian learning from online reviews and investigates the conditions for learning the quality of a product and the speed of learning under different rating systems. A rating system provides information about reviews left by ... Full text Cite

Too Much Data: Prices and Inefficiencies in Data Markets

Journal Article American Economic Journal: Microeconomics · January 1, 2022 When a user shares her data with online platforms, she reveals information about others. In such a setting, externalities depress the price of data because once a user's information is leaked by others, she has less reason to protect her data and privacy. ... Full text Cite

Bridging Central and Local Differential Privacy in Data Acquisition Mechanisms

Conference Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems · January 1, 2022 We study the design of optimal Bayesian data acquisition mechanisms for a platform interested in estimating the mean of a distribution by collecting data from privacy-conscious users. In our setting, users have heterogeneous sensitivities for two types of ... Cite

Maximizing Sequence-Submodular Functions and Its Application to Online Advertising

Journal Article Management Science · October 1, 2021 Motivated by applications in online advertising, we consider a class of maximization problems where the objective is a function of the sequence of actions and the running duration of each action. For these problems, we introduce the concepts of sequencesub ... Full text Cite

Revenue Maximization under Unknown Private Values with Non-Obligatory Inspection

Conference EC 2021 - Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation · July 18, 2021 We consider the problem of selling a single item to n unit-demand buyers to maximize revenue, where the buyers' values are independently distributed (not necessarily identical) according to publicly known distributions but unknown to the buyers themselves, ... Full text Cite

Informational braess' paradox: The effect of information on traffic congestion

Journal Article Operations Research · July 1, 2018 To systematically study the implications of additional information about routes provided to certain users (e.g., via GPS-based route guidance systems), we introduce a new class of congestion games in which users have differing information sets about the av ... Full text Cite

Convergence Rate of Distributed ADMM over Networks

Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control · October 1, 2017 We propose a new distributed algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to minimize sum of locally known convex functions using communication over a network. This optimization problem emerges in many applications in distributed m ... Full text Cite

Network maximal correlation

Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering · October 1, 2017 We introduce Network Maximal Correlation (NMC) as a multivariate measure of nonlinear association among random variables. NMC is defined via an optimization that infers transformations of variables by maximizing aggregate inner products between transformed ... Full text Cite

Privacy-constrained network formation

Journal Article Games and Economic Behavior · September 1, 2017 We study the effects of privacy concerns on social network formation. Each individual decides which others to form links with. Links bring direct benefits from friendship but also lead to the sharing of information via a percolation process. Privacy concer ... Full text Cite

Principal Inertia Components and Applications

Journal Article IEEE Transactions on Information Theory · August 1, 2017 We explore properties and applications of the principal inertia components (PICs) between two discrete random variables $X$ and $Y$. The PICs lie in the intersection of information and estimation theory, and provide a fine-grained decomposition of the depe ... Full text Cite

Guesswork subject to a total entropy budget

Conference 55th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2017 · July 1, 2017 We consider an abstraction of computational security in password protected systems where a user draws a secret string of given length with i.i.d. characters from a finite alphabet, and an adversary would like to identify the secret string by querying, or g ... Full text Cite

Optimal pricing policy of network goods

Conference 55th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2017 · July 1, 2017 We study the optimal pricing policy of a strategic monopolist selling durable goods in a dynamic pricing game with multiple rounds. Customers are forward-looking and experience a (positive) network externality, i.e., each customer's utility depends not onl ... Full text Cite

A geometric perspective on guesswork

Conference 2015 53rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2015 · April 4, 2016 Guesswork is the position at which a random string drawn from a given probability distribution appears in the list of strings ordered from the most likely to the least likely. We define the tilt operation on probability distributions and show that it param ... Full text Cite

Privacy-Constrained Network Formation

Conference Performance Evaluation Review · December 1, 2015 Full text Cite

Fundamental limits of perfect privacy

Conference IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings · September 28, 2015 We investigate the problem of intentionally disclosing information about a set of measurement points X (useful information), while guaranteeing that little or no information is revealed about a private variable S (private information). Given that S and X a ... Full text Cite

Forgot your password: Correlation dilution

Conference IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory - Proceedings · September 28, 2015 We consider the problem of diluting common randomness from correlated observations by separated agents. This problem creates a new framework to study statistical privacy, in which a legitimate party, Alice, has access to a random variable X, whereas an att ... Full text Cite

On locally decodable source coding

Conference IEEE International Conference on Communications · September 9, 2015 With the boom of big data, traditional source coding techniques face the common obstacle to decode only a small portion of information efficiently. In this paper, we aim to resolve this difficulty by introducing a specific type of source coding scheme call ... Full text Cite

Graph balancing for distributed subgradient methods over directed graphs

Conference Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control · February 8, 2015 We consider a multi agent optimization problem where a set of agents collectively solves a global optimization problem with the objective function given by the sum of locally known convex functions. We focus on the case when information exchange among agen ... Full text Cite

Using T-codes as locally decodable source codes

Conference 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, ITW 2014 · December 1, 2014 A locally decodable source code (LDSC) allows the recovery of arbitrary parts of an unencoded message from its encoded version, using only a part of the encoded message as input, a challenge that arises when searching within compressed data sets. Simple so ... Full text Cite

From the Information Bottleneck to the Privacy Funnel

Conference 2014 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, ITW 2014 · December 1, 2014 We focus on the privacy-utility trade-off encountered by users who wish to disclose some information to an analyst, that is correlated with their private data, in the hope of receiving some utility. We rely on a general privacy statistical inference framew ... Full text Cite

Broadcast-based distributed alternating direction method of multipliers

Conference 2014 52nd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2014 · January 30, 2014 We consider a multi agent optimization problem where a network of agents collectively solves a global optimization problem with the objective function given by the sum of locally known convex functions. We propose a fully distributed broadcast-based Altern ... Full text Cite

Tunable sparse network coding for multicast networks

Conference 2014 International Symposium on Network Coding, NetCod 2014 - Conference Proceedings · January 1, 2014 This paper shows the potential and key enabling mechanisms for tunable sparse network coding, a scheme in which the density of network coded packets varies during a transmission session. At the beginning of a transmission session, sparsely coded packets ar ... Full text Cite

Privacy-utility tradeoff under statistical uncertainty

Conference 2013 51st Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Allerton 2013 · January 1, 2013 We focus on the privacy-accuracy tradeoff encountered by a user who wishes to release some data to an analyst, that is correlated with his private data, in the hope of receiving some utility. We rely on a general statistical inference framework, under whic ... Full text Cite