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Creators/Authors contains: "Erginbas, Yigit Efe"

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  1. Online pricing has been the focus of extensive research in recent years, particularly in the context of selling an item to sequentially arriving users. However, what if a provider wants to maximize revenue by selling multiple items to multiple users in each round? This presents a complex problem, as the provider must intelligently offer the items to those users who value them the most without exceeding their highest acceptable prices. In this study, we tackle this challenge by designing online algorithms that can efficiently offer and price items while learning user valuations from accept/reject feedback. We focus on three user valuation models (fixed valuations, random experiences, and random valuations) and provide algorithms with nearly-optimal revenue regret guarantees. In particular, for any market setting with N users, M items, and load L (which roughly corresponds to the maximum number of simultaneous allocations possible), our algorithms achieve regret of order O(NMloglog(LT)) under fixed valuations model, O(√NMLT) under random experiences model and O(√NMLT) under random valuations model in T rounds. 
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  2. Large-scale online recommendation systems must facilitate the allocation of a limited number of items among competing users while learning their preferences from user feedback. As a principled way of incorporating market constraints and user incentives in the design, we consider our objectives to be two-fold: maximal social welfare with minimal instability. To maximize social welfare, our proposed framework enhances the quality of recommendations by exploring allocations that optimistically maximize the rewards. To minimize instability, a measure of users' incentives to deviate from recommended allocations, the algorithm prices the items based on a scheme derived from the Walrasian equilibria. Though it is known that these equilibria yield stable prices for markets with known user preferences, our approach accounts for the inherent uncertainty in the preferences and further ensures that the users accept their recommendations under offered prices. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to integrate techniques from combinatorial bandits, optimal resource allocation, and collaborative filtering to obtain an algorithm that achieves sub-linear social welfare regret as well as sub-linear instability. Empirical studies on synthetic and real-world data also demonstrate the efficacy of our strategy compared to approaches that do not fully incorporate all these aspects. 
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