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Faculty Research - Seminars & Conferences - TGIF: Research Seminar Series on Data Science in Business

TGIF (Think Grapple Innovate Fridays): Research Seminar Series on Data Science in Business

In early 2020, the UVA Darden-Data Science Collaboratory (DCADS) organized a new tradition we call TGIF, or “Think-Grapple-Innovate-Fridays.” These recurring events are intended to bring together researchers from a variety of departments and disciplines to explore areas for collaboration. Please visit this link for more information.

2023-2024 Speakers:

Title: From Dynamic Pricing to Dynamic Stackelberg Games: Going Beyond the No Learning Theorem
 
Abstract:
In this work, we study dynamic Stackelberg games, i.e. games in which a leader and a follower repeatedly interact, where the follower’s type is unknown and the follower is non-myopic. A natural question to ask is, can the leader learn the optimal strategy against the unknown follower through these repeated interactions? The No Learning Theorem from dynamic pricing, a particular type of dynamic Stackelberg game, would suggest that the leader cannot learn effectively from the follower. In contrast, we demonstrate, for the first time, that in general dynamic Stackelberg games, the leader can improve her utility through learning in repeated play. We also provide an algorithm based on a novel and compact mixed-integer linear program for finding the leader’s optimal dynamic policy. We also show that this dynamic policy continues to be nearly optimal even when allowing for the leader to have a larger strategy space, specifically if we permit communication between the leader and follower. Finally, we develop an algorithm to compute a Markovian policy for the leader that approximates the optimal policy while allowing for more efficient computation. Through simulations, we examine the efficiency, compared to static policies, and the runtime of the proposed algorithms
 

  • November 17, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, Darden
  • December 15, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, SDS
  • January 19, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, Darden
  • February 16, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, SDS
  • March 15, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, Darden
  • April 19, 10:00 - 11:30 AM, SDS

Past speakers include Rupert Freeman, Michael Albert, Jingjing Li, Max Biggs, Brent Kitchens, and Gizem Korkmaz.