Related papers: Robust Pricing with Refunds
It is a common practice in the current literature of electricity markets to use game-theoretic approaches for strategic price bidding. However, they generally rely on the assumption that the strategic bidders have prior knowledge of rival…
Making an informed decision -- for example, when choosing a career or housing -- requires knowledge about the available options. Such knowledge is generally acquired through costly trial and error, but this learning process can be disrupted…
We study prior-independent pricing for selling a single item to a single buyer when the seller observes only a single sample from the valuation distribution, while the buyer knows the distribution. Classical robust pricing approaches either…
With the huge growth in e-commerce domain, product recommendations have become an increasing field of interest amongst e-commerce companies. One of the more difficult tasks in product recommendations is size and fit predictions. There are a…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
In feature-based dynamic pricing, a seller sets appropriate prices for a sequence of products (described by feature vectors) on the fly by learning from the binary outcomes of previous sales sessions ("Sold" if valuation $\geq$ price, and…
When selling information products, the seller can provide some free partial information to change people's valuations so that the overall revenue can possibly be increased. We study the general problem of advertising information products by…
Affordance refers to the perception of possible actions allowed by an object. Despite its relevance to human-computer interaction, no existing theory explains the mechanisms that underpin affordance-formation; that is, how affordances are…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
In a wide variety of applications, including personalization, we want to measure the difference in outcome due to an intervention and thus have to deal with counterfactual inference. The feedback from a customer in any of these situations…
Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…
Points-based rewards programs are a prevalent way to incentivize customer loyalty; in these programs, customers who make repeated purchases from a seller accumulate points, working toward eventual redemption of a free reward. These programs…
We study a general class of repeated auctions, such as the ones found in electricity markets, as multi-agent games between the bidders. In such a repeated setting, bidders can adapt their strategies online based on the data observed in the…
Consumers discover their preferences through experience, yet the sequence and composition of those experiences are often designed by firms, digital platforms, or policymakers. We introduce a ``data-design'' framework for preference…
Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…
A monopolist sells multiple goods to an uninformed buyer. The buyer chooses to learn any one-dimensional linear signal of their values for the goods, anticipating the seller's mechanism. The seller designs an optimal mechanism, anticipating…
We study the pricing behavior of third-party platforms facing strategic agents. Assuming the platform is a revenue maximizer, it observes market features that generally affect demand. Since only the equilibrium price and quantity are…
We analyze strategic communication when advice is generated by a reinforcement-learning algorithm rather than by a fully rational sender. Building on the cheap-talk framework of Crawford and Sobel (1982), an advisor adapts its messages…