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Selecting which products to display and at what prices is a central decision in retail and e-commerce operations. In many applications, these two choices must be made jointly under limited display capacity and uncertain customer demand. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-22 Yunfan Zhang , Yuxuan Han , Hongyu Shan , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

A sequential design problem for rank aggregation is commonly encountered in psychology, politics, marketing, sports, etc. In this problem, a decision maker is responsible for ranking $K$ items by sequentially collecting pairwise noisy…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-10-18 Xi Chen , Yunxiao Chen , Xiaoou Li

In this paper, we consider a multi-stage dynamic assortment optimization problem with multi-nomial choice modeling (MNL) under resource knapsack constraints. Given the current resource inventory levels, the retailer makes an assortment…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-05 Xi Chen , Mo Liu , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

This paper addresses a novel data science problem, prescriptive price optimization, which derives the optimal price strategy to maximize future profit/revenue on the basis of massive predictive formulas produced by machine learning. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-25 Shinji Ito , Ryohei Fujimaki

Aiming to overcome some of the limitations of worst-case analysis, the recently proposed framework of "algorithms with predictions" allows algorithms to be augmented with a (possibly erroneous) machine-learned prediction that they can use…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Eric Balkanski , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Xizhi Tan , Cherlin Zhu

We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Mark Braverman , Jieming Mao , Jon Schneider , S. Matthew Weinberg

In this paper, we formulate an optimal ordering policy as a stochastic control problem where each firm decides the amount of input goods to order from their upstream suppliers based on the current inventory level of its output good. For…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Jose I. Caiza , Ian Walter , Jitesh H. Panchal , Junjie Qin , Philip E. Pare

We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , Shahar Dobzinski , Sigal Oren

Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-09-30 Vahab Mirrokni , S. Muthukrishnan , Uri Nadav

In this paper we deal with stochastic optimization problems where the data distributions change in response to the decision variables. Traditionally, the study of optimization problems with decision-dependent distributions has assumed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-05 Zifan Wang , Changxin Liu , Thomas Parisini , Michael M. Zavlanos , Karl H. Johansson

A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Toon Vanderschueren , Bart Baesens , Tim Verdonck , Wouter Verbeke

We consider the problem of supply and demand balancing that is stated as a minimization problem for the total expected revenue function describing the behavior of both consumers and suppliers. In the considered market model we assume that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-29 Dmitry Pasechnyuk , Pavel Dvurechensky , Sergey Omelchenko , Alexander Gasnikov

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-03 Kun Zhang

We consider the revenue maximization problem with sharp multi-demand, in which $m$ indivisible items have to be sold to $n$ potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ is interested in getting exactly $d_i$ items, and each item $j$ gives a benefit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-12-16 Vittorio Bilò , Michele Flammini , Gianpiero Monaco

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

When sales of a product are affected by randomness in demand, retailers can use dynamic pricing strategies to maximise their profits. In this article the pricing problem is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem, where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-10-17 Asbjørn N. Riseth , Jeff N. Dewynne , Chris L. Farmer

We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-10 Constantinos Daskalakis , Alan Deckelbaum , Christos Tzamos

We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-09-04 Yang Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis

We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-26 Yeon-Koo Che , Weijie Zhong

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa