Related papers: The Limits of Search Algorithms

Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. Advertisers have to determine how to place bids on the keywords of their interest in order to maximize their return for a given budget: this…

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

Algorithms for determining quality/cost/price tradeoffs in saturated markets are considered. A product is modeled by $d$ real-valued qualities whose sum determines the unit cost of producing the product. This leads to the following…

A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…

Sponsored search in E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Taobao and Tmall provides sellers an effective way to reach potential buyers with most relevant purpose. In this paper, we study the auction mechanism optimization problem in…

Auctions are widely used in exchanges to match buy and sell requests. Once the buyers and sellers place their requests, the exchange determines how these requests are to be matched. The two most popular objectives used while determining the…

This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…

This paper addresses two classes of different, yet interrelated optimization problems. The first class of problems involves a robot that must locate a hidden target in an environment that consists of a set of concurrent rays. The second…

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…

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…

In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…

This paper studies a search problem where a consumer is initially aware of only a few products. At every point in time, the consumer then decides between searching among alternatives he is already aware of and discovering more products. I…

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…

This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…

One-max search is a classic problem in online decision-making, in which a trader acts on a sequence of revealed prices and accepts one of them irrevocably to maximise its profit. The problem has been studied both in probabilistic and in…

The online retailers network models are considered. In some nodes of the network consumers are located. Each consumer wishes to purchase a particular product at minimal cost due to the price of goods and transport corruption costs. Also, in…

This paper explores the integration of strategic optimization methods in search advertising, focusing on ad ranking and bidding mechanisms within E-commerce platforms. By employing a combination of reinforcement learning and evolutionary…

We propose a new efficient online algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can…

We consider a two-way trading problem, where investors buy and sell a stock whose price moves within a certain range. Naturally they want to maximize their profit. Investors can perform up to $k$ trades, where each trade must involve the…

We introduce a new class of combinatorial markets in which agents have covering constraints over resources required and are interested in delay minimization. Our market model is applicable to several settings including scheduling, cloud…