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arXiv 2007.10144cs.GTcs.LGecon.TH
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竞争的赌徒:竞争下探索的风险

Competing Bandits: The Perils of Exploration Under Competition

Northwestern University(西北大学);Tel Aviv University(特拉维夫大学);Google Tel Aviv(谷歌特拉维夫);Microsoft Research(微软研究院);Carnegie Mellon University(卡内基梅隆大学)

Guy Aridor, Yishay Mansour, Aleksandrs Slivkins, Zhiwei Steven Wu

AI总结:

研究在线平台在竞争环境下平衡探索与用户竞争的问题,发现激烈竞争导致平台采用低福利的“贪婪”算法,而通过提供免费用户等削弱竞争的方式能激励更好的探索策略并提升用户福利。

摘要:

大多数在线平台致力于从与用户的交互中学习,许多平台还进行探索:为了获取新信息而做出可能次优的选择。我们研究探索与竞争之间的相互作用:这些平台如何平衡用于学习的探索与对用户的竞争。在这里,用户扮演三种不同的角色:他们是产生收入的客户,是用于学习的数据源,也是在竞争平台中进行选择的利己智能体。我们考虑一个风格化的双头垄断模型,其中两家公司面临相同的多臂赌徒问题。用户逐一到达并在两家公司之间做出选择,因此每家公司只有在被选中时才能在其赌徒问题上取得进展。通过理论结果和数值模拟的结合,我们研究竞争是否以及在多大程度上激励了采用更好的赌徒算法,以及它是否会导致用户福利的增加。我们发现,激烈的竞争促使公司采用一种会导致低福利的“贪婪”赌徒算法。然而,通过为公司提供一些“免费”用户来削弱竞争,能激励更好的探索策略并增加福利。我们研究了削弱竞争的两个渠道:放宽用户的理性和给予一家公司先发优势。我们的发现与“竞争与创新”的关系密切相关,并阐明了数字经济中的先发优势。

英文摘要:

Most online platforms strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition: how such platforms balance the exploration for learning and the competition for users. Here users play three distinct roles: they are customers that generate revenue, they are sources of data for learning, and they are self-interested agents which choose among the competing platforms. We consider a stylized duopoly model in which two firms face the same multi-armed bandit problem. Users arrive one by one and choose between the two firms, so that each firm makes progress on its bandit problem only if it is chosen. Through a mix of theoretical results and numerical simulations, we study whether and to what extent competition incentivizes the adoption of better bandit algorithms, and whether it leads to welfare increases for users. We find that stark competition induces firms to commit to a "greedy" bandit algorithm that leads to low welfare. However, weakening competition by providing firms with some "free" users incentivizes better exploration strategies and increases welfare. We investigate two channels for weakening the competition: relaxing the rationality of users and giving one firm a first-mover advantage. Our findings are closely related to the "competition vs. innovation" relationship, and elucidate the first-mover advantage in the digital economy.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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