Leveraging Reviews: Learning to Price with Buyer and Seller Uncertainty

You are cordially invited to the weekly CS Machine Learning Lunch Meetings. This is a chance to get to know machine learning professors, and talk to your fellow researchers.  Our next meeting will be on Tuesday Feb. 21 12:15-1:15pm in CS 1240. Professor Kirthi Kandasamy will tell us about some game theory, see abstract below.

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Abstract: In online marketplaces, customers have access to hundreds of reviews for a single product. Buyers often use reviews from other customers that share their type—such as height for clothing and skin type for skincare products—to estimate their values, which they may not know a priori. Customers with few relevant reviews may hesitate to make a purchase except at a low price, so for the seller, there is a tension between setting high prices and ensuring that there are enough reviews that buyers can confidently estimate their values. In the meantime, sellers can use reviews to gauge the demand for their products.