Welfare Maximization in Online Two-sided Marketplaces

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many successful e-commerce marketplace platforms like AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, and Upwork, where a central platform mediates economic transactions between buyers and sellers. Some common features that distinguish such marketplaces from more traditional marketplaces are search and discovery of the service providers which could result in asymmetric matching of services; sharing of a service by multiple users such as ride-sharing; and handling different preferences such as patience, desired level of service expressed by participating agents. In this talk, I will summarize our work on different welfare maximizing strategies arising out of the aforementioned scenarios.