Related papers: Detecting collusion in procurement auctions
Given the magnitude of online auction transactions, it is difficult to safeguard consumers from dishonest sellers, such as shill bidders. To date, the application of Machine Learning Techniques (MLTs) to auction fraud has been limited,…
Artificial intelligence algorithms are increasingly used by firms to set prices. Previous research shows that they can exhibit collusive behaviour, but how quickly they can do so has so far remained an open question. I show that a modern…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
In online advertising, a set of potential advertisements can be ranked by a certain auction system where usually the top-1 advertisement would be selected and displayed at an advertising space. In this paper, we show a selection bias issue…
Pricing decisions are increasingly made by AI. Thanks to their ability to train with live market data while making decisions on the fly, deep reinforcement learning algorithms are especially effective in taking such pricing decisions. In…
Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
Shill bidding occurs when fake bids are introduced into an auction on the seller's behalf in order to artificially inflate the final price. This is typically achieved by the seller having friends bid in her auctions, or the seller controls…
Game theory has been developed by scientists as a theory of strategic interaction among players who are supposed to be perfectly rational. These strategic interactions might have been presented in an auction, a business negotiation, a chess…
With a novel search algorithm or assortment planning or assortment optimization algorithm that takes into account a Bayesian approach to information updating and two-stage assortment optimization techniques, the current research provides a…
The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a…
The costs and impacts of government corruption range from impairing a country's economic growth to affecting its citizens' well-being and safety. Public contracting between government dependencies and private sector instances, referred to…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of eCommerce, Artificial Intelligence (AI) based pricing algorithms, particularly those utilizing Reinforcement Learning (RL), are becoming increasingly prevalent. This rise has led to an inextricable…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
Recent research has shown that criminal networks have complex organizational structures, but whether this can be used to predict static and dynamic properties of criminal networks remains little explored. Here, by combining graph…
Existing auction mechanisms are vulnerable to bidder collusion, which substantially degrades revenue and non-colluder welfare. To design truthful mechanisms resilient to collusion, we introduce a novel approach that leverages a machine…
In an illiquid stock, traders can collude and place orders on a predetermined price and quantity at a fixed schedule. This is usually done to manipulate the price of the stock or to create artificial liquidity in the stock, which may…