Market Making without Regret

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò, Cesari, Tommaso, Colomboni, Roberto, Foscari, Luigi, Pathak, Vinayak
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò
Cesari, Tommaso
Colomboni, Roberto
Foscari, Luigi
Pathak, Vinayak
author_facet Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò
Cesari, Tommaso
Colomboni, Roberto
Foscari, Luigi
Pathak, Vinayak
contents We consider a sequential decision-making setting where, at every round $t$, a market maker posts a bid price $B_t$ and an ask price $A_t$ to an incoming trader (the taker) with a private valuation for one unit of some asset. If the trader's valuation is lower than the bid price, or higher than the ask price, then a trade (sell or buy) occurs. If a trade happens at round $t$, then letting $M_t$ be the market price (observed only at the end of round $t$), the maker's utility is $M_t - B_t$ if the maker bought the asset, and $A_t - M_t$ if they sold it. We characterize the maker's regret with respect to the best fixed choice of bid and ask pairs under a variety of assumptions (adversarial, i.i.d., and their variants) on the sequence of market prices and valuations. Our upper bound analysis unveils an intriguing connection relating market making to first-price auctions and dynamic pricing. Our main technical contribution is a lower bound for the i.i.d. case with Lipschitz distributions and independence between prices and valuations. The difficulty in the analysis stems from the unique structure of the reward and feedback functions, allowing an algorithm to acquire information by graduating the "cost of exploration" in an arbitrary way.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_13993
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Market Making without Regret
Cesa-Bianchi, Nicolò
Cesari, Tommaso
Colomboni, Roberto
Foscari, Luigi
Pathak, Vinayak
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Trading and Market Microstructure
We consider a sequential decision-making setting where, at every round $t$, a market maker posts a bid price $B_t$ and an ask price $A_t$ to an incoming trader (the taker) with a private valuation for one unit of some asset. If the trader's valuation is lower than the bid price, or higher than the ask price, then a trade (sell or buy) occurs. If a trade happens at round $t$, then letting $M_t$ be the market price (observed only at the end of round $t$), the maker's utility is $M_t - B_t$ if the maker bought the asset, and $A_t - M_t$ if they sold it. We characterize the maker's regret with respect to the best fixed choice of bid and ask pairs under a variety of assumptions (adversarial, i.i.d., and their variants) on the sequence of market prices and valuations. Our upper bound analysis unveils an intriguing connection relating market making to first-price auctions and dynamic pricing. Our main technical contribution is a lower bound for the i.i.d. case with Lipschitz distributions and independence between prices and valuations. The difficulty in the analysis stems from the unique structure of the reward and feedback functions, allowing an algorithm to acquire information by graduating the "cost of exploration" in an arbitrary way.
title Market Making without Regret
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Trading and Market Microstructure
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.13993