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When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in…

General Economics · Economics 2025-11-03 Hangcheng Zhao , Ron Berman

With dynamic pricing on the rise, firms are using sophisticated algorithms for price determination. These algorithms are often non-interpretable and there has been a recent interest in their seemingly emergent ability to tacitly collude…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Pravesh Koirala , Forrest Laine

Algorithmic agents are used in a variety of competitive decision-making settings, including pricing contexts that range from online retail to residential home rental. We study the emergence of algorithmic collusion when competing agents…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-10 Connor Douglas , Foster Provost , Arun Sundararajan

This paper introduces Capability-Priced Micro-Markets (CPMM), a micro-economic framework designed to enable robust, scalable, and secure commerce among autonomous AI agents on the agentic web. The framework addresses the fundamental…

Markov Potential Games (MPGs) form an important sub-class of Markov games, which are a common framework to model multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. In particular, MPGs include as a special case the identical-interest setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Pragnya Alatur , Anas Barakat , Niao He

This study investigates the implications of algorithmic pricing in digital marketplaces, focusing on Airbnb's pricing dynamics. With the advent of Airbnb's new pricing tool, this research explores how digital tools influence hosts' pricing…

General Economics · Economics 2023-12-12 Richeng Piao

In this study, a cooperative game model is presented to schedule the day-ahead operation of multi-microgrid (MMG) systems. In the proposed model, microgrids are scheduled to achieve a global optimum for the cost of the multi-microgrid…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-11 Mohadese Movahednia , Hamid Karimi , Shahram Jadid

We investigate Nash equilibrium learning in a competitive Markov Game (MG) environment, where multiple agents compete, and multiple Nash equilibria can exist. In particular, for an oligopolistic dynamic pricing environment, exact Nash…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Larkin Liu

We consider the problem of communicating exogenous information by means of Markov decision process trajectories. This setting, which we call a Markov coding game (MCG), generalizes both source coding and a large class of referential games.…

Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Xingchen Xu , Stephanie Lee , Yong Tan

Nowadays, a significant share of the Business-to-Consumer sector is based on online platforms like Amazon and Alibaba and uses Artificial Intelligence for pricing strategies. This has sparked debate on whether pricing algorithms may tacitly…

General Economics · Economics 2024-06-05 Shidi Deng , Maximilian Schiffer , Martin Bichler

As algorithms increasingly mediate competitive decision-making, their influence extends beyond individual outcomes to shaping strategic market dynamics. In two preregistered experiments, we examined how algorithmic advice affects human…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Tobias R. Rebholz , Maxwell Uphoff , Christian H. R. Bernges , Florian Scholten

Autonomous pricing algorithms are increasingly influencing competition in digital markets; however, their behavior under realistic demand conditions remains largely unexamined. This paper offers a thorough analysis of four pricing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Aheer Sravon , Md. Ibrahim , Devdyuti Mazumder , Ridwan Al Aziz

Algorithmic pricing on online e-commerce platforms raises the concern of tacit collusion, where reinforcement learning algorithms learn to set collusive prices in a decentralized manner and through nothing more than profit feedback. This…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Gianluca Brero , Nicolas Lepore , Eric Mibuari , David C. Parkes

Although the specific structures of electricity markets are diverse around the world, they were all conceived on the premise of predictable, controllable generation with nonnegligible marginal costs. Recent changes, specifically, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Orcun Karaca

We study a new class of Markov games, \emph(multi-player) zero-sum Markov Games} with \emph{Networked separable interactions} (zero-sum NMGs), to model the local interaction structure in non-cooperative multi-agent sequential…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Chanwoo Park , Kaiqing Zhang , Asuman Ozdaglar

We study the performance of policy gradient methods for the subclass of Markov games known as Markov potential games (MPGs), which extends the notion of normal-form potential games to the stateful setting and includes the important special…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Dingyang Chen , Qi Zhang , Thinh T. Doan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal strategy using a pre-collected dataset without further interactions with the environment. While various algorithms have been proposed for offline RL in the previous literature,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Wei Xiong , Han Zhong , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Liwei Wang , Tong Zhang

In this study, we apply reinforcement learning techniques and propose what we call reinforcement mechanism design to tackle the dynamic pricing problem in sponsored search auctions. In contrast to previous game-theoretical approaches that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Weiran Shen , Binghui Peng , Hanpeng Liu , Michael Zhang , Ruohan Qian , Yan Hong , Zhi Guo , Zongyao Ding , Pengjun Lu , Pingzhong Tang

We study non-atomic congestion games on parallel-link networks with affine cost functions. We investigate the power of machine-learned predictions in the design of coordination mechanisms aimed at minimizing the impact of selfishness. Our…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-11 George Christodoulou , Vasilis Christoforidis , Alkmini Sgouritsa , Ioannis Vlachos