ICML 2018oral23 citations

Weakly Consistent Optimal Pricing Algorithms in Repeated Posted-Price Auctions with Strategic Buyer

Alexey Drutsa

Abstract

We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his cumulative discounted surplus. We propose a novel algorithm that never decreases offered prices and has a tight strategic regret bound of $\Theta(\log\log T)$. This result closes the open research question on the existence of a no-regret horizon-independent weakly consistent pricing. We also show that the property of non-decreasing prices is nearly necessary for a weakly consistent algorithm to be a no-regret one.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v80-drutsa18a,
  title = 	 {Weakly Consistent Optimal Pricing Algorithms in Repeated Posted-Price Auctions with Strategic Buyer},
  author =       {Drutsa, Alexey},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {1319--1328},
  year = 	 {2018},
  editor = 	 {Dy, Jennifer and Krause, Andreas},
  volume = 	 {80},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {10--15 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/drutsa18a/drutsa18a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/drutsa18a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his cumulative discounted surplus. We propose a novel algorithm that never decreases offered prices and has a tight strategic regret bound of $\Theta(\log\log T)$. This result closes the open research question on the existence of a no-regret horizon-independent weakly consistent pricing. We also show that the property of non-decreasing prices is nearly necessary for a weakly consistent algorithm to be a no-regret one.}
}
Weakly Consistent Optimal Pricing Algorithms in Repeated Posted-Price Auctions with Strategic Buyer · ICML 2018