{"title":"The Science of the Deal: Optimal Bargaining on eBay Using Deep Reinforcement Learning","authors":"Etan A. Green, E. B. Plunkett","doi":"10.1145/3490486.3538373","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Bargaining is ubiquitous. How can people bargain better? We train a reinforcement learning agent to bargain optimally in \"Best Offer\" listings on eBay, and we characterize its behavior in a manner that humans can use. As a buyer, the agent starts lower than human buyers and bargains longer. As the seller, the agent interprets offers as signals---of the buyer's willingness to pay and of the item's desirability---that human sellers ignore. Simple strategies derived from these agents purchase more items for lower prices than human buyers and sell more items for higher prices than human sellers.","PeriodicalId":209859,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3490486.3538373","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Bargaining is ubiquitous. How can people bargain better? We train a reinforcement learning agent to bargain optimally in "Best Offer" listings on eBay, and we characterize its behavior in a manner that humans can use. As a buyer, the agent starts lower than human buyers and bargains longer. As the seller, the agent interprets offers as signals---of the buyer's willingness to pay and of the item's desirability---that human sellers ignore. Simple strategies derived from these agents purchase more items for lower prices than human buyers and sell more items for higher prices than human sellers.