English
Related papers

Related papers: Optimal Refund Mechanism with Consumer Learning

200 papers

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Rishi Patel , Emmanouil Pountourakis , Samuel Taggart

Recourse provides individuals who received undesirable labels (e.g., denied a loan) from algorithmic decision-making systems with a minimum-cost improvement suggestion to achieve the desired outcome. However, in practice, models often get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Phone Kyaw , Kshitij Kayastha , Shahin Jabbari

This article studies inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem, where two agents are considered. A learner agent does not know the expert agent's performance cost function, but it…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-28 Zhongshi Sun , Guangyan Jia

I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-10 Peiran Xiao

We consider a model of third-degree price discrimination where the seller's product valuation is unknown to the market designer, who aims to maximize buyer surplus by revealing buyer valuation information. Our main result shows that the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-10 Itai Arieli , Yakov Babichenko , Omer Madmon , Moshe Tennenholtz

We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Aldo Pacchiano , Christoph Dann , Claudio Gentile

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-15 Yannik Peeters , Arnoud V. den Boer , Michel Mandjes

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

This paper derives an optimal control strategy for a simple stochastic dynamical system with constant drift and an additive control input. Motivated by the example of a physical system with an unexpected change in its dynamics, we take the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-09 Daniel Gurevich , Debdipta Goswami , Charles L. Fefferman , Clarence W. Rowley

Price-based revenue management is an important problem in operations management with many practical applications. The problem considers a retailer who sells a product (or multiple products) over $T$ consecutive time periods and is subject…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-01 Yining Wang , He Wang

The performance of an energy system under a real-time pricing mechanism depends on the consumption behavior of its customers, which involves uncertainties. In this paper, we consider a system operator that charges its customers with a…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Ceyhun Eksin , Hakan Delic , Alejandro Ribeiro

We test the predictions of the sticky information model using a survey dataset by comparing shoppers accuracy in recalling the prices of regulated and comparable unregulated products. Because regulated product prices are capped, they are…

General Economics · Economics 2025-02-25 Doron Sayag , Avichai Snir , Daniel Levy

In high-stakes applications, predictive models must not only produce accurate predictions but also quantify and communicate their uncertainty. Reject-option prediction addresses this by allowing the model to abstain when prediction…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Vojtech Franc , Jakub Paplham

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2018-10-18 Weijie Zhong

We introduce and study the online Bayesian recommendation problem for a recommender system platform. The platform has the privilege to privately observe a utility-relevant \emph{state} of a product at each round and uses this information to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yiding Feng , Wei Tang , Haifeng Xu

In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Zeng Fu , Jiashuo Jiang , Yuan Zhou

Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-08-16 Nikhil Garg , Lodewijk Gelauff , Sukolsak Sakshuwong , Ashish Goel

Inverse optimal control can be used to characterize behavior in sequential decision-making tasks. Most existing work, however, is limited to fully observable or linear systems, or requires the action signals to be known. Here, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Dominik Straub , Matthias Schultheis , Heinz Koeppl , Constantin A. Rothkopf

Motivated by information sharing in online platforms, we study repeated persuasion between a sender and a stream of receivers where at each time, the sender observes a payoff-relevant state drawn independently and identically from an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-06 You Zu , Krishnamurthy Iyer , Haifeng Xu

Learning optimal feedback control laws capable of executing optimal trajectories is essential for many robotic applications. Such policies can be learned using reinforcement learning or planned using optimal control. While reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Michael Lutter , Boris Belousov , Kim Listmann , Debora Clever , Jan Peters