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Related papers: Pricing with a Hidden Sample

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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

The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Renato Paes Leme , Balasubramanian Sivan , Yifeng Teng , Pratik Worah

The classic third degree price discrimination (3PD) model requires the knowledge of the distribution of buyer valuations and the covariate to set the price conditioned on the covariate. In terms of generating revenue, the classic result…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-17 Haitian Xie , Ying Zhu , Denis Shishkin

This paper develops a framework to study the statistical power of revealed-preference tests. With randomly sampled budgets and mild smoothness of demand, statistical learning implies that any model consistent with the data must approximate…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-12 Charles Gauthier , Raghav Malhotra , Agustin Troccoli Moretti

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Aviad Rubinstein , S. Matthew Weinberg

We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Moshe Babaioff , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , S. Matthew Weinberg

We consider a dynamic pricing problem for repeated contextual second-price auctions with multiple strategic buyers who aim to maximize their long-term time discounted utility. The seller has limited information on buyers' overall demand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Negin Golrezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Jason Cheuk Nam Liang

A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-10 Zihao Li , Jonathan Libgober , Xiaosheng Mu

We study the problem of a seller dynamically pricing $d$ distinct types of indivisible goods, when faced with the online arrival of unit-demand buyers drawn independently from an unknown distribution. The goods are not in limited supply,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-06-13 Aaron Roth , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jonathan Ullman , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We study a data pricing problem, where a seller has access to $N$ homogeneous data points (e.g. drawn i.i.d. from some distribution). There are $m$ types of buyers in the market, where buyers of the same type $i$ have the same valuation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Keran Chen , Joon Suk Huh , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We study stochastic programs where the decision-maker cannot observe the distribution of the exogenous uncertainties but has access to a finite set of independent samples from this distribution. In this setting, the goal is to find a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-24 Bart P. G. Van Parys , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Daniel Kuhn

A principal curve serves as a powerful tool for uncovering underlying structures of data through 1-dimensional smooth and continuous representations. On the basis of optimal transport theories, this paper introduces a novel principal curve…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-15 Tongseok Lim , Kyeongsik Nam , Jinwon Sohn

This paper considers behavior-based price discrimination in the repeated sale of a non-durable good to a single long-lived buyer, by a seller without commitment power. We assume that there is a mixed population of forward-looking…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Rishi Patel , Emmanouil Pountourakis , Samuel Taggart

We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-12-17 Joris Pinkse , Karl Schurter

A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-06-17 Tan Gan , Hongcheng Li

An informed seller designs a dynamic mechanism to sell an experience good. The seller has partial information about the product match, which affects the buyer's private consumption experience. We characterize equilibrium mechanisms of this…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-06-24 Tan Gan , Nicholas Wu

We study the robust sequential screening problem of a monopolist seller of multiple cloud computing services facing a buyer who has private information about his demand distribution for these services. At the time of contracting, the buyer…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-12 Dirk Bergemann , Rahul Deb

We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-01 Pranav Dandekar , Nadia Fawaz , Stratis Ioannidis

We study a setting in which a data buyer seeks to estimate an unknown parameter by purchasing samples from one of K data sellers. Each seller has privately known data quality (e.g., high vs. low variance) and a private per-sample cost. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Nivasini Ananthakrishnan , Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

We introduce the use of reinforcement learning for indirect mechanisms, working with the existing class of sequential price mechanisms, which generalizes both serial dictatorship and posted price mechanisms and essentially characterizes all…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Gianluca Brero , Alon Eden , Matthias Gerstgrasser , David C. Parkes , Duncan Rheingans-Yoo