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Poster
Generalized Random Utility Models with Multiple Types
Hossein Azari Soufiani · Hansheng Diao · Zhenyu Lai · David Parkes

Thu Dec 05 07:00 PM -- 11:59 PM (PST) @ Harrah's Special Events Center, 2nd Floor
in Poster Session »

We propose a model for demand estimation in multi-agent, differentiated product settings and present an estimation algorithm that uses reversible jump MCMC techniques to classify agents' types. Our model extends the popular setup in Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) to allow for the data-driven classification of agents' types using agent-level data. We focus on applications involving data on agents' ranking over alternatives, and present theoretical conditions that establish the identifiability of the model and uni-modality of the likelihood/posterior. Results on both real and simulated data provide support for the scalability of our approach.

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Author Information

Hossein Azari Soufiani (Harvard University)
Hansheng Diao (Harvard University)
Zhenyu Lai (Harvard University)
David Parkes (Harvard University)

David C. Parkes is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was the recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship and the Harvard University Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching. Parkes received his Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M.Eng. (First class) in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. At Harvard, Parkes leads the EconCS group and teaches classes in artificial intelligence, optimization, and topics at the intersection between computer science and economics. Parkes has served as Program Chair of ACM EC’07 and AAMAS’08 and General Chair of ACM EC’10, served on the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and currently serves as Editor of Games and Economic Behavior and on the boards of Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems and INFORMS Journal of Computing. His research interests include computational mechanism design, electronic commerce, stochastic optimization, preference elicitation, market design, bounded rationality, computational social choice, networks and incentives, multi-agent systems, crowd-sourcing and social computing.

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