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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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-19 Dipankar Das

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 -…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Martin Bichler , Julius Durmann , Matthias Oberlechner

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Yiding Feng , Ronen Gradwohl , Jason Hartline , Aleck Johnsen , Denis Nekipelov

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Nicole Immorlica , Jieming Mao , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaowu Dai , Wenlu Xu , Yuan Qi , Michael I. Jordan

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Eshwar Ram Arunachaleswaran , Natalie Collina , Sampath Kannan , Aaron Roth , Juba Ziani

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…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2011-02-24 Alexei B. Ryabov , Bernd Blasius

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-03 Nikhil Kumar

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…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jackie Baek , Atanas Dinev , Thodoris Lykouris

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Diego Martinez-Baselga , Luis Riazuelo , Luis Montano

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Zheqing Zhu , Benjamin Van Roy

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-30 Ian Ball , Deniz Kattwinkel , Jan Knoepfle

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-11-16 Hans Gersbach , Akaki Mamageishvili , Fikri Pitsuwan

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Benjamin Schiffer , Mark Sellke

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…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Yuhong Luo , Daniel Schoepflin , Xintong Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-16 Stefano Tracà , Cynthia Rudin , Weiyu Yan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Yongchan Kwon , Antonio Ginart , James Zou