Related papers: On the limitations of data-based price discriminat…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
How much value does a dataset or a data production process have to an agent who wishes to use the data to assist decision-making? This is a fundamental question towards understanding the value of data as well as further pricing of data.…
We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…
We study the sample complexity of learning a uniform approximation of an $n$-dimensional cumulative distribution function (CDF) within an error $\epsilon > 0$, when observations are restricted to a minimal one-bit feedback. This serves as a…
In the Learning to Price setting, a seller posts prices over time with the goal of maximizing revenue while learning the buyer's valuation. This problem is very well understood when values are stationary (fixed or iid). Here we study the…
We consider a scenario where a seller possesses a dataset $D$ and trains it into models of varying accuracies for sale in the market. Due to the reproducibility of data, the dataset can be reused to train models with different accuracies,…
We consider the problem of using expert data with unobserved confounders for imitation and reinforcement learning. We begin by defining the problem of learning from confounded expert data in a contextual MDP setup. We analyze the…
Triple difference-in-differences designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in empirical work. Surveying the literature, we find that most applications include controls. We show that this standard practice is generally biased for…
We consider a feature-based personalized pricing problem in which the buyer is strategic: given the seller's pricing policy, the buyer can augment the features that they reveal to the seller to obtain a low price for the product. We model…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
Data analytics using machine learning (ML) has become ubiquitous in science, business intelligence, journalism and many other domains. While a lot of work focuses on reducing the training cost, inference runtime and storage cost of ML…
We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework, where a seller not only sets product price but also designs flexible 'advertising schemes' to influence customers' valuation of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
In programmatic advertising, ad slots are usually sold using second-price (SP) auctions in real-time. The highest bidding advertiser wins but pays only the second-highest bid (known as the winning price). In SP, for a single item, the…
Over the past decades, researchers and ML practitioners have come up with better and better ways to build, understand and improve the quality of ML models, but mostly under the key assumption that the training data is distributed…
Product bundling is a common selling mechanism used in online retailing. To set profitable bundle prices, the seller needs to learn consumer preferences from the transaction data. When customers purchase bundles or multiple products,…
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 how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…
Data valuation is a class of techniques for quantitatively assessing the value of data for applications like pricing in data marketplaces. Existing data valuation methods define a value for a discrete dataset. However, in many use cases,…