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Related papers: Monopoly, Product Quality, and Flexible Learning

200 papers

Algorithmic pricing raises a question of interpretation as well as intervention: when autonomous deep-learning pricing systems sustain supracompetitive prices, what strategic pattern have they learned, and how might market institutions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Soumen Banerjee

We examine the implications of consumer privacy when preferences today depend upon past consumption choices, and consumers shop from different sellers in each period. Although consumers are ex ante identical, their initial consumption…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-17 V. Bhaskar , Nikita Roketskiy

Imitation learning often assumes that demonstrations are close to optimal according to some fixed, but unknown, cost function. However, according to satisficing theory, humans often choose acceptable behavior based on their personal (and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Rushit N. Shah , Nikolaos Agadakos , Synthia Sasulski , Ali Farajzadeh , Sanjiban Choudhury , Brian Ziebart

A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-06-01 Laura Doval , Vasiliki Skreta

Considering that a trader or a trading algorithm interacting with markets during continuous auctions can be modeled by an iterating procedure adjusting the price at which he posts orders at a given rhythm, this paper proposes a procedure…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2012-09-12 Sophie Laruelle , Charles-Albert Lehalle , Gilles Pagès

Decision making in modern stochastic systems, including e-commerce platforms, financial markets and healthcare systems, has evolved into a multifaceted process that combines information acquisition and adaptive information sources. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Renyuan Xu , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Luhao Zhang

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Aviad Rubinstein , S. Matthew Weinberg

We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Anna Lunghi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi

On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Nikita Kalinin

I show that firms price almost competitively and consumers can infer product quality from prices in markets where firms differ in quality and production cost, and learning prices is costly. Bankruptcy risk or regulation links higher quality…

General Economics · Economics 2018-08-17 Sander Heinsalu

Feature selection can facilitate the learning of mixtures of discrete random variables as they arise, e.g. in crowdsourcing tasks. Intuitively, not all workers are equally reliable but, if the less reliable ones could be eliminated, then…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-28 Vincent Zhao , Steven W. Zucker

We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-04-28 Vasudha Jain , Mark Whitmeyer

We study an information acquisition problem in which an informed trader acquires costly information prior to trading in the Kyle equilibrium. The cost of information acquisition is represented by an entropy cost. Regardless of the prior…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-24 S. Viswanathan , Hao Xing

We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

We consider a monopoly insurance market with a risk-neutral profit-maximizing insurer and a consumer with Yaari Dual Utility preferences that distort the given continuous loss distribution. The insurer observes the loss distribution but not…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-04-03 Mario Ghossoub , Bin Li , Benxuan Shi

How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-11 Dirk Bergemann , Tibor Heumann , Stephen Morris

We study deterministic monopoly pricing under partial knowledge of the market, where the seller has access only to summary statistics of the valuation distribution, such as the mean, dispersion, and maximum value. Using tools from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-09 Tim S. G. van Eck , Pieter Kleer , Johan S. H. van Leeuwaarden

Online platforms collect rich information about participants and then share some of this information back with them to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem in two-sided markets: If a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-09-01 Bar Light , Ramesh Johari , Gabriel Weintraub

In this paper, we study learning in probabilistic domains where the learner may receive incorrect labels but can improve the reliability of labels by repeatedly sampling them. In such a setting, one faces the problem of whether the fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Timo Bertram , Johannes Fürnkranz , Martin Müller

We study competitive equilibria in the classic Shapley-Shubik assignment model with indivisible goods and unit-demand buyers, with budget constraints: buyers can specify a maximum price they are willing to pay for each item, beyond which…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2010-04-19 Ning Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Arpita Ghosh