We study how a seller can learn a reserve price for a second-price auction from censored historical bid data. Because values below past reserves are unobserved, even unlimited data may not reveal whic...
The paper studies contextual bilateral trade with full feedback, showing that action-independent observations eliminate the usual polynomial adaptation penalty seen in heavy-tailed bandits. It presents fully parameter-free algorithms that achieve oracle minimax regret rates without knowing the moment order or scale, and derives new regret bounds for both parametric and nonparametric settings. The key technical insight is a paired squared‑loss statistic whose noise cancels, enabling model selection and yielding regret rates that interpolate between classical nonparametric and linear extremes.
By Hangyi Zhao
arXiv:2503. 01701v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function.
By Francesco Bacchiocchi, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi, Nicola Gatti
The paper investigates online fair allocation of sequential items to agents with heterogeneous preferences, aiming to maximize generalized-mean welfare. In an i.i.d. arrival setting, a pure greedy algorithm achieves near-optimal “~O(1/T)” average regret without needing distributional knowledge. For nonstationary arrivals, the authors show that a single historical sample per distribution suffices to recover the same regret rate, using re-solving algorithms that remain robust to distribution shifts.
By Zongjun Yang, Rachitesh Kumar, Christian Kroer
The paper addresses an online resource allocation problem where a budget must be distributed among multiple arms under censored feedback. Each arm yields a reward only if it is activated by an unknown Bernoulli process and the allocated budget exceeds a random threshold from an unknown parametric distribution. The authors establish a worst‑case regret lower bound of Σ(√T), propose the RA‑UCB algorithm achieving near‑optimal regret when the budget is known, and introduce MG‑UCB for unknown, round‑dependent budgets, validating both approaches experimentally.
By Giovanni Montanari, C\^ome Fiegel, Corentin Pla, Aadirupa Saha, Vianney Perchet
arXiv:2607. 29460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heavy-tailed distributions arise naturally in sequential decision-making problems such as financial investment, online advertising, and network management, where rare but extreme outcomes can dominate performance.
By Gianmarco Genalti, Alberto Maria Metelli
arXiv:2610.09691v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study online learning in market making, where, at each round, a market maker posts bid and ask prices before observing the market price and the pr...
By Maria Elena Vischi, Francesco Emanuele Stradi, Alberto Marchesi
arXiv:2505.02796v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We study budget pacing in repeated first-price auctions when an advertiser's private-value distributions change over time and the stationary...
By Yige Wang, Jiashuo Jiang
arXiv:2610.35551v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In stochastic multi-objective bandits, Pareto optimal arms may represent different trade-offs among objectives. Balanced sampling across them is impo...
By Mengfan Xu
The paper investigates transfer learning in stochastic multi‑armed bandits when historical data come from an unknown adaptive policy. It establishes asymptotic problem‑dependent lower bounds and introduces the KL‑UCB‑Transfer algorithm, which combines online and historical data to achieve logarithmic regret with an improved constant under certain mean‑gap conditions. The study also relaxes the source‑target discrepancy assumption to a one‑sided condition, demonstrating that logarithmic regret can still be achieved under misspecification and identifying regimes of improvement, degradation, or loss of guarantee.
By Adrien Prevost, Timothee Mathieu, Waris Radji, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
The paper introduces a doubly robust framework for distributionally robust offline contextual pricing, addressing challenges of distributional shifts and continuous actions. It proposes a localized DR estimator that is computationally efficient and semiparametrically optimal, and a learning algorithm that exploits demand noise smoothness to achieve finite‑sample regret bounds of τ^{-σ/(2σ+1)} for smoothness orders s=1,2. Experiments across varying distribution shifts demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
By Min Xu, Xinyi Yin, Yunfan Zhang, Yuxuan Han, Houcai Shen, Caihua Chen
arXiv:2606. 19883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in the competitive setup with two-sided matching markets under a human centric decision making model.
By Ananya Kunisetty, Avishek Ghosh