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Abstract People respond quickly when they have a clear preference and slowly when they are close to indifference. The question is whether others exploit this tendency to infer private information. In two-stage bargaining experiments, we observe that the speed with which buyers reject sellers’ offers decreases with the size of the foregone surplus. This should allow sellers to infer buyers’ values from response times (RT), creating an incentive for buyers to manipulate their RT. We experimentally identify distinct conditions under which subjects do, and do not, exhibit such strategic behaviour. These results provide the first insight into the possible use of RT as a strategic variable.
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Learning Competitive Equilibria in Noisy Combinatorial Markets
We present a methodology to robustly estimate the competitive equilibria (CE) of combinatorial markets under the assumption that buyers do not know their precise valuations for bundles of goods, but instead can only provide noisy estimates. We first show tight lower- and upper-bounds on the buyers' utility loss, and hence the set of CE, given a uniform approximation of one market by another. We then present two probably-approximately-correct algorithms for learning CE with finite-sample guarantees. The first is a baseline and the second leverages a connection between the first welfare theorem of economics and uniform approximations to adaptively prune value queries when it is determined that they are provably not part of a CE. Extensive experimentation shows that pruning achieves better estimates than the baseline with far fewer samples.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1761546
- PAR ID:
- 10290824
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AAMAS Conference proceedings
- ISSN:
- 2523-5699
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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