Probabilistic Pricebots

Game Theoretic and Decision Theoretic Agents

Volume

Papers from the 2001 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Past research has been concemed with the potential of embedding deterministic pricing algorithms into pricebots" software agents used by on-line sellers to automatically price Intemet goods. In this work, probabilistic pricing algorithms based on no-regret learning are explored, in both high-information and low-information settings. It is shown via simulations that the long-run empirical frequencies of prices in a market of no-regret pricebots can converge to equilibria arbitrarily close to an asymmetric Nash equilibrium; symmetric Nash equilibria are typically unstable. Instantaneous price distributions, however, need not converge.