Related papers: Optimal Refund Mechanism with Consumer Learning
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…