Toward Optimal Regret in Robust Pricing: Decoupling Corruption and Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kalupahana, Kalana, Stradi, Francesco Emanuele, Castiglioni, Matteo, Marchesi, Alberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kalupahana, Kalana
Stradi, Francesco Emanuele
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
author_facet Kalupahana, Kalana
Stradi, Francesco Emanuele
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
contents We design the first regret guarantees for robust dynamic pricing that decouple the dependence on the corruption $C$ and the time horizon $T$. In dynamic pricing, a seller with unlimited supply of a good interacts with a stream of buyers over \( T \) rounds, with the goal of maximizing revenue. At each round $t$, the seller posts a price $p_t$, and the buyer purchases the good only if their unknown valuation $v^\star$ exceeds this price. The seller observes only the binary feedback $\mathbb{I} \left\{ p_t \leq v^\star \right\}$, indicating whether a sale occurred. In the \emph{robust} pricing setting, a malicious adversary is allowed to corrupt this feedback in at most $C$ rounds. Even if the learner knows the corruption $C$, the best known regret bound is $\mathcal{O}(C\log\log T)$ by Gupta et al. [2025]. This leaves as an open problem to ``decouple'' the dependence on $C$ and $T$. In this work, we resolve this open problem. In particular, we develop a robust variant of binary search that achieves regret $\mathcal{O}(C+\log T)$ when the corruption $C$ is known and $\mathcal{O}(C+\log^2 T)$ when the corruption is unknown.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08290
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Optimal Regret in Robust Pricing: Decoupling Corruption and Time
Kalupahana, Kalana
Stradi, Francesco Emanuele
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We design the first regret guarantees for robust dynamic pricing that decouple the dependence on the corruption $C$ and the time horizon $T$. In dynamic pricing, a seller with unlimited supply of a good interacts with a stream of buyers over \( T \) rounds, with the goal of maximizing revenue. At each round $t$, the seller posts a price $p_t$, and the buyer purchases the good only if their unknown valuation $v^\star$ exceeds this price. The seller observes only the binary feedback $\mathbb{I} \left\{ p_t \leq v^\star \right\}$, indicating whether a sale occurred. In the \emph{robust} pricing setting, a malicious adversary is allowed to corrupt this feedback in at most $C$ rounds. Even if the learner knows the corruption $C$, the best known regret bound is $\mathcal{O}(C\log\log T)$ by Gupta et al. [2025]. This leaves as an open problem to ``decouple'' the dependence on $C$ and $T$. In this work, we resolve this open problem. In particular, we develop a robust variant of binary search that achieves regret $\mathcal{O}(C+\log T)$ when the corruption $C$ is known and $\mathcal{O}(C+\log^2 T)$ when the corruption is unknown.
title Toward Optimal Regret in Robust Pricing: Decoupling Corruption and Time
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08290