Feature-Based Online Bilateral Trade

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Gaucher, Solenne, Bernasconi, Martino, Castiglioni, Matteo, Celli, Andrea, Perchet, Vianney
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914814809341952
author Gaucher, Solenne
Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Celli, Andrea
Perchet, Vianney
author_facet Gaucher, Solenne
Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Celli, Andrea
Perchet, Vianney
contents Bilateral trade models the problem of facilitating trades between a seller and a buyer having private valuations for the item being sold. In the online version of the problem, the learner faces a new seller and buyer at each time step, and has to post a price for each of the two parties without any knowledge of their valuations. We consider a scenario where, at each time step, before posting prices the learner observes a context vector containing information about the features of the item for sale. The valuations of both the seller and the buyer follow an unknown linear function of the context. In this setting, the learner could leverage previous transactions in an attempt to estimate private valuations. We characterize the regret regimes of different settings, taking as a baseline the best context-dependent prices in hindsight. First, in the setting in which the learner has two-bit feedback and strong budget balance constraints, we propose an algorithm with $O(\log T)$ regret. Then, we study the same set-up with noisy valuations, providing a tight $\widetilde O(T^{\frac23})$ regret upper bound. Finally, we show that loosening budget balance constraints allows the learner to operate under more restrictive feedback. Specifically, we show how to address the one-bit, global budget balance setting through a reduction from the two-bit, strong budget balance setup. This established a fundamental trade-off between the quality of the feedback and the strictness of the budget constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_18183
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Feature-Based Online Bilateral Trade
Gaucher, Solenne
Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Celli, Andrea
Perchet, Vianney
Computer Science and Game Theory
Bilateral trade models the problem of facilitating trades between a seller and a buyer having private valuations for the item being sold. In the online version of the problem, the learner faces a new seller and buyer at each time step, and has to post a price for each of the two parties without any knowledge of their valuations. We consider a scenario where, at each time step, before posting prices the learner observes a context vector containing information about the features of the item for sale. The valuations of both the seller and the buyer follow an unknown linear function of the context. In this setting, the learner could leverage previous transactions in an attempt to estimate private valuations. We characterize the regret regimes of different settings, taking as a baseline the best context-dependent prices in hindsight. First, in the setting in which the learner has two-bit feedback and strong budget balance constraints, we propose an algorithm with $O(\log T)$ regret. Then, we study the same set-up with noisy valuations, providing a tight $\widetilde O(T^{\frac23})$ regret upper bound. Finally, we show that loosening budget balance constraints allows the learner to operate under more restrictive feedback. Specifically, we show how to address the one-bit, global budget balance setting through a reduction from the two-bit, strong budget balance setup. This established a fundamental trade-off between the quality of the feedback and the strictness of the budget constraints.
title Feature-Based Online Bilateral Trade
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18183