Inferring Private Valuations from Behavioral Data in Bilateral Sequential Bargaining

Inferring Private Valuations from Behavioral Data in Bilateral Sequential Bargaining

Lvye Cui, Haoran Yu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2624-2632. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/292

Inferring bargainers' private valuations on items from their decisions is crucial for analyzing their strategic behaviors in bilateral sequential bargaining. Most existing approaches that infer agents' private information from observable data either rely on strong equilibrium assumptions or require a careful design of agents' behavior models. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose a Bayesian Learning-based Valuation Inference (BLUE) framework. Our key idea is to derive feasible intervals of bargainers' private valuations from their behavior data, using the fact that most bargainers do not choose strictly dominated strategies. We leverage these feasible intervals to guide our inference. Specifically, we first model each bargainer's behavior function (which maps his valuation and bargaining history to decisions) via a recurrent neural network. Second, we learn these behavior functions by utilizing a novel loss function defined based on feasible intervals. Third, we derive the posterior distributions of bargainers' valuations according to their behavior data and learned behavior functions. Moreover, we account for the heterogeneity of bargainer behaviors, and propose a clustering algorithm (K-Loss) to improve the efficiency of learning these behaviors. Experiments on both synthetic and real bargaining data show that our inference approach outperforms baselines.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Auctions and market-based systems
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Noncooperative games
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Other