Research map / Bandits and online learning / Online convex optimization and games
Learning for pricing and auctions
Develop regret-minimizing pricing and bidding algorithms for repeated auctions with strategic buyers.
101 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026) · an approach in Online convex optimization and games, keyword cluster “price · pricing · auctions”
State History Tried Preprints Who Export
Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
24 papers in 2023–24 and 32 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic grew, from 10.5% to 11.6%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2016 · Online Spatio-Temporal Matching in Stochastic and Dynamic Domains (AAAI 2016 · 23 citations)
- 2017 · Additional Multi-Touch Attribution for Online Advertising (AAAI 2017 · 26 citations)
- 2018 · A Combinatorial-Bandit Algorithm for the Online Joint Bid/Budget Optimization of Pay-per-Click Advertising Campaigns (AAAI 2018 · 44 citations)
- 2019 · Dynamic Incentive-Aware Learning: Robust Pricing in Contextual Auctions (NeurIPS 2019 · 71 citations)
- 2020 · Online Pricing with Offline Data: Phase Transition and Inverse Square Law (ICML 2020 · 15 citations)
- 2021 · ROI Maximization in Stochastic Online Decision-Making (NeurIPS 2021 · 3 citations)
- 2022 · Real-Time Driver-Request Assignment in Ridesourcing (AAAI 2022 · 9 citations)
- 2023 · Multi-channel Autobidding with Budget and ROI Constraints (ICML 2023 · 9 citations)
- 2024 · Dynamic Budget Throttling in Repeated Second-Price Auctions (AAAI 2024 · 4 citations)
- 2025 · Learning to price with resource constraints: from full information to machine-learned prices (NeurIPS 2025 · 3 citations)
- 2026 · SACO: Sequence-Aware Constrained Optimization Framework for Coupon Distribution in E-commerce (AAAI 2026 · 1 citation)
Earliest papers here
- Online Spatio-Temporal Matching in Stochastic and Dynamic Domains (AAAI 2016 · 23 citations)
- Lift-Based Bidding in Ad Selection (AAAI 2016 · 18 citations)
- Pricing a Low-regret Seller (ICML 2016 · 6 citations)
What has been tried
71 papers here report 391 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 69%, no clear effect 6%, hurt 19%, mixed 5%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Increase P_ub from 90% to 95% | Offline evaluation · Unsmoothness | 4.14% increase | Hurt | Percentile Risk-Constrained Budget Pacing for Guaranteed Display Advertising in Online Optimization (AAAI 2024 · 3 citations) |
| Increase hard inventory limit from R=10 to R=50 | CSI 500 stock paths, full sample · mean final absolute inventory | 5.52 -> 18.25 | Hurt | Adaptive Market Making with Inventory Constraints via Online Learning (AAAI 2025 · 0 citations) |
| Increase LOBM slackness parameter from 0.5 to 0.8 | MovieLens · worst-case normalized reward | 0.8324 -> 0.8538 | Helped | Online Budgeted Matching with General Bids (NeurIPS 2024 · 0 citations) |
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 56 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- Google · 9 papers
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology · 8 papers
- Peking University · 3 papers
- University of Chicago · 3 papers
- Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique · 3 papers
- Southwestern University of Finance and Economics · 2 papers
- Northwestern University · 2 papers
- University of Warwick · 2 papers
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong · 2 papers
- Columbia University · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 40 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
Get alerts. Describe your idea in scime atlas and save it (free scime account): you get a weekly email when new preprints land close to it.
Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Online learning with feedback graphs (155 papers)
- Best-of-both-worlds bandit algorithms (125 papers)
- Online allocation with constraints (77 papers)
- Online decision-making with feedback structure (81 papers)
- Online linear-quadratic control regret (36 papers)
- Learning-augmented online algorithms (73 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Constrained and unconstrained OCO algorithms (85 papers)
- Last-iterate convergence in games (65 papers)
- Dynamic and adaptive regret (57 papers)
- Parameter-free non-stationary online learning (45 papers)
- Fast no-regret dynamics in games (37 papers)
- Counterfactual regret minimization (15 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).