Near-Optimal Regret-Queue Length Tradeoff in Online Learning for Two-Sided Markets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Zixian, Varma, Sushil Mahavir, Ying, Lei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yang, Zixian
Varma, Sushil Mahavir
Ying, Lei
author_facet Yang, Zixian
Varma, Sushil Mahavir
Ying, Lei
contents We study a two-sided market, wherein, price-sensitive heterogeneous customers and servers arrive and join their respective queues. A compatible customer-server pair can then be matched by the platform, at which point, they leave the system. Our objective is to design pricing and matching algorithms that maximize the platform's profit, while maintaining reasonable queue lengths. As the demand and supply curves governing the price-dependent arrival rates may not be known in practice, we design a novel online-learning-based pricing policy and establish its near-optimality. In particular, we prove a tradeoff among three performance metrics: $\tilde{O}(T^{1-γ})$ regret, $\tilde{O}(T^{γ/2})$ average queue length, and $\tilde{O}(T^γ)$ maximum queue length for $γ\in (0, 1/6]$, significantly improving over existing results [1]. Moreover, barring the permissible range of $γ$, we show that this trade-off between regret and average queue length is optimal up to logarithmic factors under a class of policies, matching the optimal one as in [2] which assumes the demand and supply curves to be known. Our proposed policy has two noteworthy features: a dynamic component that optimizes the tradeoff between low regret and small queue lengths; and a probabilistic component that resolves the tension between obtaining useful samples for fast learning and maintaining small queue lengths.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14097
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Near-Optimal Regret-Queue Length Tradeoff in Online Learning for Two-Sided Markets
Yang, Zixian
Varma, Sushil Mahavir
Ying, Lei
Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
Optimization and Control
Probability
We study a two-sided market, wherein, price-sensitive heterogeneous customers and servers arrive and join their respective queues. A compatible customer-server pair can then be matched by the platform, at which point, they leave the system. Our objective is to design pricing and matching algorithms that maximize the platform's profit, while maintaining reasonable queue lengths. As the demand and supply curves governing the price-dependent arrival rates may not be known in practice, we design a novel online-learning-based pricing policy and establish its near-optimality. In particular, we prove a tradeoff among three performance metrics: $\tilde{O}(T^{1-γ})$ regret, $\tilde{O}(T^{γ/2})$ average queue length, and $\tilde{O}(T^γ)$ maximum queue length for $γ\in (0, 1/6]$, significantly improving over existing results [1]. Moreover, barring the permissible range of $γ$, we show that this trade-off between regret and average queue length is optimal up to logarithmic factors under a class of policies, matching the optimal one as in [2] which assumes the demand and supply curves to be known. Our proposed policy has two noteworthy features: a dynamic component that optimizes the tradeoff between low regret and small queue lengths; and a probabilistic component that resolves the tension between obtaining useful samples for fast learning and maintaining small queue lengths.
title Near-Optimal Regret-Queue Length Tradeoff in Online Learning for Two-Sided Markets
topic Machine Learning
Computer Science and Game Theory
Optimization and Control
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14097