Related papers: Sales Policies for a Virtual Assistant
Sampling efficiency is a key bottleneck in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Existing group-based policy optimization methods, such as GRPO, allocate a fixed number of rollouts for all training prompts. This uniform allocation…
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…
Efficient access to high-quality information is vital for online platforms. To promote more useful information, users not only create new content but also evaluate existing content, often through helpfulness voting. Although aggregated…
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…
We study the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller…
Large language models are increasingly used as personal assistants, yet most lack a persistent user model, forcing users to repeatedly restate preferences across sessions. We propose Vector-Adapted Retrieval Scoring (VARS), a…
With the rise of voice assistants and an increase in mobile search usage, natural language has become an important query language. So far, most of the current systems are not able to process these queries because of the vagueness and…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…
Modern recommender systems model people and items by discovering or `teasing apart' the underlying dimensions that encode the properties of items and users' preferences toward them. Critically, such dimensions are uncovered based on user…
The stable marriage problem and its extensions have been extensively studied, with much of the work in the literature assuming that agents fully know their own preferences over alternatives. This assumption however is not always practical…
Public speaking is an essential skill in everyone's professional or academic career. Nevertheless, honing this skill is often tricky because training in front of a mirror does not give feedback or inspire the same anxiety as present-ing in…
This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an…
Prior research in psychology has found that people's decisions are often inconsistent. An individual's decisions vary across time, and decisions vary even more across people. Inconsistencies have been identified not only in subjective…
We consider the optimal value of information (VoI) problem, where the goal is to sequentially select a set of tests with a minimal cost, so that one can efficiently make the best decision based on the observed outcomes. Existing algorithms…
We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement…
This paper considers behavior-based price discrimination in the repeated sale of a non-durable good to a single long-lived buyer, by a seller without commitment power. We assume that there is a mixed population of forward-looking…
Our society is governed by a set of norms which together bring about the values we cherish such as safety, fairness or trustworthiness. The goal of value-alignment is to create agents that not only do their tasks but through their…
As the sociological theory of homophily suggests, people tend to interact with those of similar preferences. Motivated by this well-established phenomenon, today's online sellers, such as Amazon,~seek~to learn a new buyer's private…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…