11,207 research outputs found
Human-Agent Decision-making: Combining Theory and Practice
Extensive work has been conducted both in game theory and logic to model
strategic interaction. An important question is whether we can use these
theories to design agents for interacting with people? On the one hand, they
provide a formal design specification for agent strategies. On the other hand,
people do not necessarily adhere to playing in accordance with these
strategies, and their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and
psychological factors. In this paper we will consider the question of whether
strategies implied by theories of strategic behavior can be used by automated
agents that interact proficiently with people. We will focus on automated
agents that we built that need to interact with people in two negotiation
settings: bargaining and deliberation. For bargaining we will study game-theory
based equilibrium agents and for argumentation we will discuss logic-based
argumentation theory. We will also consider security games and persuasion games
and will discuss the benefits of using equilibrium based agents.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729
Modeling the Psychology of Consumer and Firm Behavior with Behavioral Economics
Marketing is an applied science that tries to explain and influence how firms and
consumers actually behave in markets. Marketing models are usually applications of
economic theories. These theories are general and produce precise predictions, but they
rely on strong assumptions of rationality of consumers and firms. Theories based on
rationality limits could prove similarly general and precise, while grounding theories in
psychological plausibility and explaining facts which are puzzles for the standard
approach.
Behavioral economics explores the implications of limits of rationality. The goal is to
make economic theories more plausible while maintaining formal power and accurate
prediction of field data. This review focuses selectively on six types of models used in
behavioral economics that can be applied to marketing.
Three of the models generalize consumer preference to allow (1) sensitivity to reference
points (and loss-aversion); (2) social preferences toward outcomes of others; and (3)
preference for instant gratification (quasi-hyperbolic discounting). The three models are
applied to industrial channel bargaining, salesforce compensation, and pricing of virtuous
goods such as gym memberships. The other three models generalize the concept of gametheoretic
equilibrium, allowing decision makers to make mistakes (quantal response
equilibrium), encounter limits on the depth of strategic thinking (cognitive hierarchy),
and equilibrate by learning from feedback (self-tuning EWA). These are applied to
marketing strategy problems involving differentiated products, competitive entry into
large and small markets, and low-price guarantees.
The main goal of this selected review is to encourage marketing researchers of all kinds
to apply these tools to marketing. Understanding the models and applying them is a
technical challenge for marketing modelers, which also requires thoughtful input from
psychologists studying details of consumer behavior. As a result, models like these could
create a common language for modelers who prize formality and psychologists who prize
realism
Flexible Decision Control in an Autonomous Trading Agent
An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators ââŹâ configurable, composable modules for data analysis and prediction that are chained together at runtime to support agent decision-making. Through a set of examples, we show how this structure supports sales and procurement decisions, and how those decision processes can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations. To put this work in context, we also report on results of an informal survey of agent design approaches among the competitors in the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM).autonomous trading agent;decision processes
Platform Competition as Network Contestability
Recent research in industrial organisation has investigated the essential
place that middlemen have in the networks that make up our global economy. In
this paper we attempt to understand how such middlemen compete with each other
through a game theoretic analysis using novel techniques from decision-making
under ambiguity. We model a purposely abstract and reduced model of one
middleman who pro- vides a two-sided platform, mediating surplus-creating
interactions between two users. The middleman evaluates uncertain outcomes
under positional ambiguity, taking into account the possibility of the
emergence of an alternative middleman offering intermediary services to the two
users. Surprisingly, we find many situations in which the middleman will
purposely extract maximal gains from her position. Only if there is relatively
low probability of devastating loss of business under competition, the
middleman will adopt a more competitive attitude and extract less from her
position.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figure
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