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Main Author: Lin, Shiyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12629
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author Lin, Shiyun
author_facet Lin, Shiyun
contents The housing market, also known as one-sided matching market, is a classic exchange economy model where each agent on the demand side initially owns an indivisible good (a house) and has a personal preference over all goods. The goal is to find a core-stable allocation that exhausts all mutually beneficial exchanges among subgroups of agents. While this model has been extensively studied in economics and computer science due to its broad applications, little attention has been paid to settings where preferences are unknown and must be learned through repeated interactions. In this paper, we propose a statistical learning model within the multi-player multi-armed bandit framework, where players (agents) learn their preferences over arms (goods) from stochastic rewards. We introduce the notion of \emph{core regret} for each player as the market objective. We study both centralized and decentralized approaches, proving $O(\log T / Δ^2)$ upper bounds on regret, where $T$ is the time horizon and $Δ$ is the minimum preference gap among players. For the decentralized setting, we also establish a matching lower bound, demonstrating that our algorithm is order-optimal.
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spellingShingle Bandit Learning in Housing Markets
Lin, Shiyun
Computer Science and Game Theory
The housing market, also known as one-sided matching market, is a classic exchange economy model where each agent on the demand side initially owns an indivisible good (a house) and has a personal preference over all goods. The goal is to find a core-stable allocation that exhausts all mutually beneficial exchanges among subgroups of agents. While this model has been extensively studied in economics and computer science due to its broad applications, little attention has been paid to settings where preferences are unknown and must be learned through repeated interactions. In this paper, we propose a statistical learning model within the multi-player multi-armed bandit framework, where players (agents) learn their preferences over arms (goods) from stochastic rewards. We introduce the notion of \emph{core regret} for each player as the market objective. We study both centralized and decentralized approaches, proving $O(\log T / Δ^2)$ upper bounds on regret, where $T$ is the time horizon and $Δ$ is the minimum preference gap among players. For the decentralized setting, we also establish a matching lower bound, demonstrating that our algorithm is order-optimal.
title Bandit Learning in Housing Markets
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12629