104 research outputs found
Dynamic Ad Allocation: Bandits with Budgets
We consider an application of multi-armed bandits to internet advertising
(specifically, to dynamic ad allocation in the pay-per-click model, with
uncertainty on the click probabilities). We focus on an important practical
issue that advertisers are constrained in how much money they can spend on
their ad campaigns. This issue has not been considered in the prior work on
bandit-based approaches for ad allocation, to the best of our knowledge.
We define a simple, stylized model where an algorithm picks one ad to display
in each round, and each ad has a \emph{budget}: the maximal amount of money
that can be spent on this ad. This model admits a natural variant of UCB1, a
well-known algorithm for multi-armed bandits with stochastic rewards. We derive
strong provable guarantees for this algorithm
Dynamic Learning of Sequential Choice Bandit Problem under Marketing Fatigue
Motivated by the observation that overexposure to unwanted marketing
activities leads to customer dissatisfaction, we consider a setting where a
platform offers a sequence of messages to its users and is penalized when users
abandon the platform due to marketing fatigue. We propose a novel sequential
choice model to capture multiple interactions taking place between the platform
and its user: Upon receiving a message, a user decides on one of the three
actions: accept the message, skip and receive the next message, or abandon the
platform. Based on user feedback, the platform dynamically learns users'
abandonment distribution and their valuations of messages to determine the
length of the sequence and the order of the messages, while maximizing the
cumulative payoff over a horizon of length T. We refer to this online learning
task as the sequential choice bandit problem. For the offline combinatorial
optimization problem, we show that an efficient polynomial-time algorithm
exists. For the online problem, we propose an algorithm that balances
exploration and exploitation, and characterize its regret bound. Lastly, we
demonstrate how to extend the model with user contexts to incorporate
personalization
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