Related papers: Variable Annuity with GMWB: surrender or not, that…

We study the optimal dynamic pricing of an expiring ticket or voucher, sold by a time-sensitive seller to strategic buyers who arrive stochastically with private values. The expiring nature creates a conflict: the seller's urgency to sell…

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a classic example of the exploration-exploitation dilemma. It is concerned with maximising the total rewards for a gambler by sequentially pulling an arm from a multi-armed slot machine where each arm…

Multi-armed bandits (MAB) model sequential decision making problems, in which a learner sequentially chooses arms with unknown reward distributions in order to maximize its cumulative reward. Most of the prior work on MAB assumes that the…

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…

Peer to peer marketplaces such as AirBnB enable transactional exchange of services directly between people. In such platforms, those providing a service (hosts in AirBnB) are faced with various choices. For example in AirBnB, although some…

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing with limited supply. A seller has $k$ identical items for sale and is facing $n$ potential buyers ("agents") that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each…

We consider a non-stationary variant of a sequential stochastic optimization problem, in which the underlying cost functions may change along the horizon. We propose a measure, termed variation budget, that controls the extent of said…

Decision making under uncertain environments in the maximization of expected reward while minimizing its risk is one of the ubiquitous problems in many subjects. Here, we introduce a novel problem setting in stochastic bandit optimization…

It is known that the decision to purchase an annuity may be associated to an optimal stopping problem. However, little is known about optimal strategies, if the mortality force is a generic function of time and if the `subjective' life…

We consider an optimal investment and risk control problem for an insurer under the mean-variance (MV) criterion. By introducing a deterministic auxiliary process defined forward in time, we formulate an alternative time-consistent problem…

We empirically evaluate a stochastic annealing strategy for Bayesian posterior optimization with variational inference. Variational inference is a deterministic approach to approximate posterior inference in Bayesian models in which a…

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

In this paper we consider the pricing of variable annuities (VAs) with guaranteed minimum withdrawal benefits. We consider two pricing approaches, the classical risk-neutral approach and the benchmark approach, and we examine the associated…

In Bayesian single-item auctions, a monotone bidding strategy--one that prescribes a higher bid for a higher value type--can be equivalently represented as a partition of the quantile space into consecutive intervals corresponding to…

Appointment scheduling problems under uncertainty encounter a fundamental trade-off between cost minimization and customer waiting times. Most existing studies address this trade-off using a weighted sum approach, which puts little emphasis…

In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form. Thus, the…

We consider a bandit problem where at any time, the decision maker can add new arms to her consideration set. A new arm is queried at a cost from an "arm-reservoir" containing finitely many "arm-types," each characterized by a distinct mean…

In this paper we investigate a class of swing options with firm constraints in view of the modeling of supply agreements. We show, for a fully general payoff process, that the premium, solution to a stochastic control problem, is concave…

We consider the problem of pricing a reusable resource service system. Potential customers arrive according to a Poisson process and purchase the service if their valuation exceeds the current price. If no units are available, customers…

The trade-off between the cost of acquiring and processing data, and uncertainty due to a lack of data is fundamental in machine learning. A basic instance of this trade-off is the problem of deciding when to make noisy and costly…