Related papers: Sales Policies for a Virtual Assistant
In recent years, online shopping has grown rapidly, especially during the COVID-19 period. However, it still lacks elements typical of physical stores, such as empathic support and personalised advice from a sales assistant. This study…
Individual-level state-transition microsimulations (iSTMs) have proliferated for economic evaluations in place of cohort state transition models (cSTMs). Probabilistic economic evaluations quantify decision uncertainty and value of…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
In this study, we propose a solution based on a multi-agent LLM architecture and a voice user interface (VUI) designed to update the knowledge base of a digital assistant. Its usability is evaluated in comparison to a more traditional…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
We study generalizations of online bipartite matching in which each arriving vertex (customer) views a ranked list of offline vertices (products) and matches to (purchases) the first one they deem acceptable. The number of products that the…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly important speech-driven Information Retrieval platforms that assist users with various tasks. We discuss open problems and challenges with respect to modeling spoken information queries for…
We study autobidding ad auctions with user costs, where each bidder is value-maximizing subject to a return-over-investment (ROI) constraint, and the seller aims to maximize the social welfare taking into consideration the user's cost of…
This study investigates how different virtual agent (VA) behaviors influence subjects' perceptions and group decision-making. Participants carried out experimental group discussions with a VA exhibiting varying levels of engagement and…
We consider assortment optimization over a continuous spectrum of products represented by the unit interval, where the seller's problem consists of determining the optimal subset of products to offer to potential customers. To describe the…
Personalized pricing is a business strategy to charge different prices to individual consumers based on their characteristics and behaviors. It has become common practice in many industries nowadays due to the availability of a growing…
We study price-discrimination games between buyers and a seller where privacy arises endogenously--that is, utility maximization yields equilibrium strategies where privacy occurs naturally. In this game, buyers with a high valuation for a…
Artificial intelligence systems increasingly involve continual learning to enable flexibility in general situations that are not encountered during system training. Human interaction with autonomous systems is broadly studied, but research…
We develop a decision making framework to cast the problem of learning a ranking policy for search or recommendation engines in a two-sided e-commerce marketplace as an expected reward optimization problem using observational data. As a…
As voice assistants (VAs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for emotion-aware systems that can recognize and respond appropriately to user emotions has grown. While significant progress has been made in speech emotion…
Voice assistants (VAs) are becoming a feature of our everyday life. Yet, the user experience (UX) is often limited, leading to underuse, disengagement, and abandonment. Co-designing interactions for VAs with potential end-users can be…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
We expand the literature on the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous item auctions by considering settings with correlated values; we do this via the fundamental economic model of interdependent values (IDV). It is well-known that in…