Online learning in digital markets

The explosive growth of online markets has created complex ecosystems of algorithmic agents. To optimize their revenue, agents need to understand how the market works, and to do so they often resort to strategies that learn from past observations. In this talk, we describe some recent results characterizing the strengths and limitations of sequential decision-making approaches applied to various problems arising in digital markets. These include dynamic pricing, bilateral trading, supply chain management, and adaptive taxation. The analysis sheds light on how the learning rates depend on the interplay between the form of the revenue function and the feedback provided during the learning process.