Related papers: Detecting collusion in procurement auctions
A major threat to the peer-review systems of computer science conferences is the existence of "collusion rings" between reviewers. In such collusion rings, reviewers who have also submitted their own papers to the conference work together…
In display advertising, a small group of sellers and bidders face each other in up to 10 12 auctions a day. In this context, revenue maximisation via monopoly price learning is a high-value problem for sellers. By nature, these auctions are…
Online rating systems are subject to malicious behaviors mainly by posting unfair rating scores. Users may try to individually or collaboratively promote or demote a product. Collaborating unfair rating 'collusion' is more damaging than…
The e-commerce share in the global retail spend is showing a steady increase over the years indicating an evident shift of consumer attention from bricks and mortar to clicks in retail sector. In recent years, online marketplaces have…
Pricing algorithms have demonstrated the capability to learn tacit collusion that is largely unaddressed by current regulations. Their increasing use in markets, including oligopolistic industries with a history of collusion, calls for…
In many large scale distributed systems and on the web, agents need to interact with other unknown agents to carry out some tasks or transactions. The ability to reason about and assess the potential risks in carrying out such transactions…
We propose a uniform approach for the design and analysis of prior-free competitive auctions and online auctions. Our philosophy is to view the benchmark function as a variable parameter of the model and study a broad class of functions…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
We consider repeated multi-unit auctions with uniform pricing, which are widely used in practice for allocating goods such as carbon licenses. In each round, $K$ identical units of a good are sold to a group of buyers that have valuations…
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…
We present a classroom game that integrates economics and data-science competencies. In the first two parts of the game, participants assume the roles of firms in a procurement market, where they must either adopt competitive behaviors or…
The rise of digital payments has accelerated the need for intelligent and scalable systems to detect fraud. This research presents an end-to-end, feature-rich machine learning framework for detecting credit card transaction anomalies and…
The prospect of collusive agreements being stabilized via the use of pricing algorithms is widely discussed by antitrust experts and economists. However, the literature is often lacking the perspective of computer scientists, and seems to…
Algorithms increasingly automate bidding in online auctions, raising concerns about tacit bid suppression and revenue shortfalls. Prior work identifies individual mechanisms behind algorithmic bid suppression, but it remains unclear which…
We study a general class of repeated auctions, such as the ones found in electricity markets, as multi-agent games between the bidders. In such a repeated setting, bidders can adapt their strategies online based on the data observed in the…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
For many application areas A/B testing, which partitions users of a system into an A (control) and B (treatment) group to experiment between several application designs, enables Internet companies to optimize their services to the…
Recent work shows that pricing with symmetric LLM agents leads to algorithmic collusion. We show that collusion is fragile under the heterogeneity typical of real deployments. In a stylized repeated-pricing model, heterogeneity in patience…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
In supervised learning one wishes to identify a pattern present in a joint distribution $P$, of instances, label pairs, by providing a function $f$ from instances to labels that has low risk $\mathbb{E}_{P}\ell(y,f(x))$. To do so, the…