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We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-06 Martino Banchio , Aranyak Mehta , Andres Perlroth

The problem of market clearing is to set a price for an item such that quantity demanded equals quantity supplied. In this work, we cast the problem of predicting clearing prices into a learning framework and use the resulting models to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Weiran Shen , Sébastien Lahaie , Renato Paes Leme

We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-29 Salvador Candelas , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier

We study the problem of pricing under a Multinomial Logit model where we incorporate network effects over the consumer's decisions. We analyse both cases, when sellers compete or collaborate. In particular, we pay special attention to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-08 Felipe Maldonado , Gerardo Berbeglia , Pascal Van Hentenryck

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Zeng Fu , Jiashuo Jiang , Yuan Zhou

We examine the dynamics of informational efficiency in a market with asymmetrically informed, boundedly rational traders who adaptively learn optimal strategies using simple multiarmed bandit (MAB) algorithms. The strategies available to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-11-11 Aleksei Pastushkov

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

Online bidding serves as a fundamental information system in mobile ecosystems, facilitating real-time ad allocation across billions of devices while optimizing both platform performance and user experience through data-driven decision…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Huanyu Yan , Yu Huo , Min Lu , Weitong Ou , Xingyan Shi , Ruihe Shi , Xiaoying Tang

This paper presents the results of the Dynamic Pricing Challenge, held on the occasion of the 17th INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Conference on June 29-30, 2017 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. For this challenge, participants…

Bid optimization for online advertising from single advertiser's perspective has been thoroughly investigated in both academic research and industrial practice. However, existing work typically assume competitors do not change their bids,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Ziyu Guan , Hongchang Wu , Qingyu Cao , Hao Liu , Wei Zhao , Sheng Li , Cai Xu , Guang Qiu , Jian Xu , Bo Zheng

We consider an assortment selection and pricing problem in which a seller has $N$ different items available for sale. In each round, the seller observes a $d$-dimensional contextual preference information vector for the user, and offers to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yigit Efe Erginbas , Thomas A. Courtade , Kannan Ramchandran

Selecting which products to display and at what prices is a central decision in retail and e-commerce operations. In many applications, these two choices must be made jointly under limited display capacity and uncertain customer demand. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-22 Yunfan Zhang , Yuxuan Han , Hongyu Shan , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Price discrimination, which refers to the strategy of setting different prices for different customer groups, has been widely used in online retailing. Although it helps boost the collected revenue for online retailers, it might create…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Xi Chen , Jiameng Lyu , Xuan Zhang , Yuan Zhou

Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Karhan Akcoglu , James Aspnes , Bhaskar DasGupta , Ming-Yang Kao

We consider a context-based dynamic pricing problem of online products, which have low sales. Sales data from Alibaba, a major global online retailer, illustrate the prevalence of low-sale products. For these products, existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-24 Sentao Miao , Xi Chen , Xiuli Chao , Jiaxi Liu , Yidong Zhang

In display advertising, advertisers want to achieve a marketing objective with constraints on budget and cost-per-outcome. This is usually formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes the total utility under constraints. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-09 Anoop R Katti , Rui C. Gonçalves , Rinchin Iakovlev

Most of the research in the recommender systems domain is focused on the optimization of the metrics based on historical data such as Mean Average Precision (MAP) or Recall. However, there is a gap between the research and industry since…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Michal Kompan , Peter Gaspar , Jakub Macina , Matus Cimerman , Maria Bielikova

We envision a marketplace where diverse entities offer specialized "modules" through APIs, allowing users to compose the outputs of these modules for complex tasks within a given budget. This paper studies the market design problem in such…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kshipra Bhawalkar , Jeff Dean , Christopher Liaw , Aranyak Mehta , Neel Patel

We develop a tractable model for studying strategic interactions between learning algorithms. We uncover a mechanism responsible for the emergence of algorithmic collusion. We observe that algorithms periodically coordinate on actions that…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-09-20 Martino Banchio , Giacomo Mantegazza

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Bo Sun , Hossein Nekouyan Jazi , Xiaoqi Tan , Raouf Boutaba