English

Toward Optimal Regret in Robust Pricing: Decoupling Corruption and Time

Machine Learning 2026-05-12 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We design the first regret guarantees for robust dynamic pricing that decouple the dependence on the corruption CC and the time horizon TT. In dynamic pricing, a seller with unlimited supply of a good interacts with a stream of buyers over T T rounds, with the goal of maximizing revenue. At each round tt, the seller posts a price ptp_t, and the buyer purchases the good only if their unknown valuation vv^\star exceeds this price. The seller observes only the binary feedback I{ptv}\mathbb{I} \left\{ p_t \leq v^\star \right\}, indicating whether a sale occurred. In the \emph{robust} pricing setting, a malicious adversary is allowed to corrupt this feedback in at most CC rounds. Even if the learner knows the corruption CC, the best known regret bound is O(CloglogT)\mathcal{O}(C\log\log T) by Gupta et al. [2025]. This leaves as an open problem to ``decouple'' the dependence on CC and TT. In this work, we resolve this open problem. In particular, we develop a robust variant of binary search that achieves regret O(C+logT)\mathcal{O}(C+\log T) when the corruption CC is known and O(C+log2T)\mathcal{O}(C+\log^2 T) when the corruption is unknown.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.08290,
  title  = {Toward Optimal Regret in Robust Pricing: Decoupling Corruption and Time},
  author = {Kalana Kalupahana and Francesco Emanuele Stradi and Matteo Castiglioni and Alberto Marchesi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08290},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:58:41.366Z