New Guarantees for Learning Revenue Maximizing Menus of Lotteries and Two-Part Tariffs

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Balcan, Maria-Florina, Beyhaghi, Hedyeh
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866909255849738240
author Balcan, Maria-Florina
Beyhaghi, Hedyeh
author_facet Balcan, Maria-Florina
Beyhaghi, Hedyeh
contents We advance a recently flourishing line of work at the intersection of learning theory and computational economics by studying the learnability of two classes of mechanisms prominent in economics, namely menus of lotteries and two-part tariffs. The former is a family of randomized mechanisms designed for selling multiple items, known to achieve revenue beyond deterministic mechanisms, while the latter is designed for selling multiple units (copies) of a single item with applications in real-world scenarios such as car or bike-sharing services. We focus on learning high-revenue mechanisms of this form from buyer valuation data in both distributional settings, where we have access to buyers' valuation samples up-front, and the more challenging and less-studied online settings, where buyers arrive one-at-a-time and no distributional assumption is made about their values. We provide a suite of results with regard to these two families of mechanisms. We provide the first online learning algorithms for menus of lotteries and two-part tariffs with strong regret-bound guarantees. Since the space of parameters is infinite and the revenue functions have discontinuities, the known techniques do not readily apply. However, we are able to provide a reduction to online learning over a finite number of experts, in our case, a finite number of parameters. Furthermore, in the limited buyers type case, we show a reduction to online linear optimization, which allows us to obtain no-regret guarantees by presenting buyers with menus that correspond to a barycentric spanner. In addition, we provide algorithms with improved running times over prior work for the distributional settings. Finally, we demonstrate how techniques from the recent literature in data-driven algorithm design are insufficient for our studied problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_11700
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle New Guarantees for Learning Revenue Maximizing Menus of Lotteries and Two-Part Tariffs
Balcan, Maria-Florina
Beyhaghi, Hedyeh
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
We advance a recently flourishing line of work at the intersection of learning theory and computational economics by studying the learnability of two classes of mechanisms prominent in economics, namely menus of lotteries and two-part tariffs. The former is a family of randomized mechanisms designed for selling multiple items, known to achieve revenue beyond deterministic mechanisms, while the latter is designed for selling multiple units (copies) of a single item with applications in real-world scenarios such as car or bike-sharing services. We focus on learning high-revenue mechanisms of this form from buyer valuation data in both distributional settings, where we have access to buyers' valuation samples up-front, and the more challenging and less-studied online settings, where buyers arrive one-at-a-time and no distributional assumption is made about their values. We provide a suite of results with regard to these two families of mechanisms. We provide the first online learning algorithms for menus of lotteries and two-part tariffs with strong regret-bound guarantees. Since the space of parameters is infinite and the revenue functions have discontinuities, the known techniques do not readily apply. However, we are able to provide a reduction to online learning over a finite number of experts, in our case, a finite number of parameters. Furthermore, in the limited buyers type case, we show a reduction to online linear optimization, which allows us to obtain no-regret guarantees by presenting buyers with menus that correspond to a barycentric spanner. In addition, we provide algorithms with improved running times over prior work for the distributional settings. Finally, we demonstrate how techniques from the recent literature in data-driven algorithm design are insufficient for our studied problems.
title New Guarantees for Learning Revenue Maximizing Menus of Lotteries and Two-Part Tariffs
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.11700