Related papers: Optimal Search and Discovery
We study a problem of an online retailer who observes the unit sales of a product, and dynamically changes the retail price, in order to maximize the expected revenue. Assuming the demand of the product is price sensitive, we are interested…
Selecting the optimal recommender via online exploration-exploitation is catching increasing attention where the traditional A/B testing can be slow and costly, and offline evaluations are prone to the bias of history data. Finding the…
Consider a customer who needs to fulfill a shopping list, and also a personal shopper who is willing to buy and resell to customers the goods in their shopping lists. It is in the personal shopper's best interest to find (shopping) routes…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
Product search is one of the most popular methods for people to discover and purchase products on e-commerce websites. Because personal preferences often have an important influence on the purchase decision of each customer, it is intuitive…
We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…
Robust optimization is a popular paradigm for modeling and solving two- and multi-stage decision-making problems affected by uncertainty. In many real-world applications, the time of information discovery is decision-dependent and the…
We consider information filtering, in which we face a stream of items too voluminous to process by hand (e.g., scientific articles, blog posts, emails), and must rely on a computer system to automatically filter out irrelevant items. Such…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
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…
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…
The Algorithm Selection Problem is concerned with selecting the best algorithm to solve a given problem on a case-by-case basis. It has become especially relevant in the last decade, as researchers are increasingly investigating how to…
Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
Motivated by online settings where users can provide explicit feedback about the relevance of products that are sequentially presented to them, we look at the recommendation process as a problem of dynamically optimizing this relevance…
Despite a growing desire among consumers to shop responsibly, translating this intention into behaviour remains challenging. Previous work has identified that information seeking (or lack thereof) is a contributing factor to this…
Finding a good compromise between the exploitation of known resources and the exploration of unknown, but potentially more profitable choices, is a general problem, which arises in many different scientific disciplines. We propose a…
We study the problem of choosing optimal policy rules in uncertain environments using models that may be incomplete and/or partially identified. We consider a policymaker who wishes to choose a policy to maximize a particular counterfactual…