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Model Selection in an Information Economy : Choosing what to Learn

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Abstract

As online markets for the exchange of goods and services become more common, the study of markets composed at least in part of autonomous agents has taken on increasing importance. In contrast to traditional completeinformation economic scenarios, agents that are operating in an electronic marketplace often do so under considerable uncertainty. In order to reduce their uncertainty, these agents must learn about the world around them. When an agent producer is engaged in a learning task in which data collection is costly, such as learning the preferences of a consumer population, it is faced with a classic decision problem: when to explore and when to exploit. If the agent has a limited number of chances to experiment, it must explicitly consider the cost of learning (in terms of foregone profit) against the value of the information acquired. Information goods add an additional dimension to this problem; due to their flexibility, they can be bundled and priced according to a number of different price schedules. An optimizing producer should consider the profit each price schedule can extract, as well as the difficulty of learning of this schedule. In this paper, we demonstrate the tradeoff between complexity and profitability for a number of common price schedules. We begin with a one-shot decision as to which schedule to learn. Schedules with moderate complexity are preferred in the short and medium term, as they are learned quickly, yet extract a significant fraction of the available profit. We then turn to the repeated version of this one-shot decision and show that moderate complexity schedules, in particular two-part tariff, perform well when the producer must adapt to nonstationarity in the consumer population. When a producer can dynamically change schedules as it learns, it can use an explicit decision-theoretic formulation to greedily select the schedule which appears to yield the greatest profit in the next period. By explicitly considering the both the learnability and the profit extracted by different price schedules, a producer can extract more profit as it learns than if it naively chose models that are accurate once learned.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher Brooks & Robert Gazzale & Rajarshi Das & Jeffrey Kephart & Jeffrey MacKie-Mason & Edmund Durfee, 2002. "Model Selection in an Information Economy : Choosing what to Learn," Department of Economics Working Papers 2002-01, Department of Economics, Williams College.
  • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2002-01
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Rothschild, Michael, 1974. "A two-armed bandit theory of market pricing," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 185-202, October.
    2. Eric Maskin & John Riley, 1984. "Monopoly with Incomplete Information," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 15(2), pages 171-196, Summer.
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    Cited by:

    1. Ehtamo, Harri & Berg, Kimmo & Kitti, Mitri, 2010. "An adjustment scheme for nonlinear pricing problem with two buyers," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 201(1), pages 259-266, February.
    2. Kimmo Berg & Harri Ehtamo, 2012. "Continuous learning methods in two-buyer pricing problem," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 75(3), pages 287-304, June.
    3. Kimmo Berg & Harri Ehtamo, 2009. "Learning in nonlinear pricing with unknown utility functions," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 172(1), pages 375-392, November.
    4. Shen, Xi & De Wilde, Philippe, 2005. "Analysis and identification of a social interaction model," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 350(2), pages 597-610.

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