Learning to Price with Persuasion

Motivated by modern marketplaces, where the platform or the seller routinely gathers detailed user profiles, we study a novel learning theoretic model that simultaneously involves information and mechanism design. Specifically, we consider the economic setting recently introduced by Bergemann et al, where in addition to the menu of quality-price pairs, the seller offers information on the value of the match between product quality and buyer's taste via a signaling scheme. We relax the assumption that the seller knows the buyers' belief about the distribution of tastes and study the sample requirements of designing a revenue maximizing scheme. We consider both the batch setting where we have access to data from a set of i.i.d. buyers and an online demand query model where we observe the buyers behaviors to seller's schemes. Despite the apparent non-convexity of the problem, we also give the first FPTAS to compute a scheme that maximizes the revenue within an arbitrarily small additive loss, which was unknown even in the previous result of Bergemann et al. Overall, this brings a new learning perspective in asymmetric economic settings where buyers and sellers know different types of information.