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Related papers: Robust Pricing with Refunds

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We develop a novel framework for costly information acquisition in which a decision-maker learns about an unobserved state by choosing a signal distribution, with the cost of information determined by the distribution of noise in the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-27 Peter Achim , Kemal Ozbek

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-03 Kun Zhang

We test the predictions of the sticky information model using a survey dataset by comparing shoppers accuracy in recalling the prices of regulated and comparable unregulated products. Because regulated product prices are capped, they are…

General Economics · Economics 2025-02-25 Doron Sayag , Avichai Snir , Daniel Levy

Motivated by pricing in ad exchange markets, we consider the problem of robust learning of reserve prices against strategic buyers in repeated contextual second-price auctions. Buyers' valuations for an item depend on the context that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Negin Golrezaei , Adel Javanmard , Vahab Mirrokni

We study how a decision-maker (DM) learns from data of unknown quality to form robust, ''general-purpose'' posterior beliefs. We develop a framework for robust learning and belief formation under a minimax-regret criterion, cast as a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-18 Yeon-Koo Che , Longjian Li , Tianling Luo

Inspired by real-time ad exchanges for online display advertising, we consider the problem of inferring a buyer's value distribution for a good when the buyer is repeatedly interacting with a seller through a posted-price mechanism. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-11-28 Kareem Amin , Afshin Rostamizadeh , Umar Syed

We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Shipra Agrawal , Constantinos Daskalakis , Vahab Mirrokni , Balasubramanian Sivan

Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Negin Golrezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Jason Cheuk Nam Liang , Vahab Mirrokni

We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-08-29 Avrim Blum , Yishay Mansour , Jamie Morgenstern

We consider a model of third-degree price discrimination where the seller's product valuation is unknown to the market designer, who aims to maximize buyer surplus by revealing buyer valuation information. Our main result shows that the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-10 Itai Arieli , Yakov Babichenko , Omer Madmon , Moshe Tennenholtz

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-12-02 Kareem Amin , Rachel Cummings , Lili Dworkin , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth

Academic research in the field of recommender systems mainly focuses on the problem of maximizing the users' utility by trying to identify the most relevant items for each user. However, such items are not necessarily the ones that maximize…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Dietmar Jannach , Gediminas Adomavicius

A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-06-01 Laura Doval , Vasiliki Skreta

We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework, where a seller not only sets product price but also designs flexible 'advertising schemes' to influence customers' valuation of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Shipra Agrawal , Yiding Feng , Wei Tang

Auctions with partially-revealed information about items are broadly employed in real-world applications, but the underlying mechanisms have limited theoretical support. In this work, we study a machine learning formulation of these types…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-06 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Ellen Vitercik

Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zhikang Fan , Weiran Shen

This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-19 Aleksei Smirnov , Egor Starkov

A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-06-17 Tan Gan , Hongcheng Li

We study a single-buyer pricing problem with unreliable side information, motivated by the increasing use of AI-assisted decision-making and LLM-based predictions. The seller observes a private sample that may be either accurate (coinciding…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhihao Gavin Tang , Yixin Tao , Shixin Wang

We design the first regret guarantees for robust dynamic pricing that decouple the dependence on the corruption $C$ and the time horizon $T$. In dynamic pricing, a seller with unlimited supply of a good interacts with a stream of buyers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kalana Kalupahana , Francesco Emanuele Stradi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi