Related papers: The Perils of Exploration under Competition: A Com…
With a novel search algorithm or assortment planning or assortment optimization algorithm that takes into account a Bayesian approach to information updating and two-stage assortment optimization techniques, the current research provides a…
The rise of algorithmic pricing in online retail platforms has attracted significant interest in how autonomous software agents interact under competition. This article explores the potential emergence of algorithmic collusion -…
Firms engaged in electronic commerce increasingly rely on predictive analytics via machine-learning algorithms to drive a wide array of managerial decisions. The tuning of many standard machine learning algorithms can be understood as…
Effective exploration is believed to positively influence the long-term user experience on recommendation platforms. Determining its exact benefits, however, has been challenging. Regular A/B tests on exploration often measure neutral or…
It is common in recommendation systems that users both consume and produce information as they make strategic choices under uncertainty. While a social planner would balance "exploration" and "exploitation" using a multi-armed bandit…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
There has been substantial recent concern that pricing algorithms might learn to ``collude.'' Supra-competitive prices can emerge as a Nash equilibrium of repeated pricing games, in which sellers play strategies which threaten to punish…
Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…
Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…
This paper examines the market for AI models in which firms compete to provide accurate model predictions and consumers exhibit heterogeneous preferences for model accuracy. We develop a consumer-firm duopoly model to analyze how…
We study online learning for new products on a platform that makes capacity-constrained assortment decisions on which products to offer. For a newly listed product, its quality is initially unknown, and quality information propagates…
Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…
Modern recommendation systems ought to benefit by probing for and learning from delayed feedback. Research has tended to focus on learning from a user's response to a single recommendation. Such work, which leverages methods of supervised…
We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
A common economic process is crowdsearch, wherein a group of agents is invited to search for a valuable physical or virtual object, e.g. creating and patenting an invention, solving an open scientific problem, or identifying vulnerabilities…
In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…
The threat of algorithmic collusion, and whether it merits regulatory intervention, remains debated, as existing evaluations of its emergence often rely on long learning horizons, assumptions about counterparty rationality in adopting…
In retail, there are predictable yet dramatic time-dependent patterns in customer behavior, such as periodic changes in the number of visitors, or increases in customers just before major holidays. The current paradigm of multi-armed bandit…
As machine learning (ML) is deployed by many competing service providers, the underlying ML predictors also compete against each other, and it is increasingly important to understand the impacts and biases from such competition. In this…