2024/06/28 by Antoine Scheid, Scheid, Antoine, Aymeric Capitaine +9 · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Economic theories and models #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (stat.ML)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.19824
openalex publication_date 2024/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In economic theory, the concept of externality refers to any indirect effect resulting from an interaction between players that affects the social welfare. Most of the models within which externality has been studied assume that agents have perfect knowledge of their environment and preferences. This is a major hindrance to the practical implementation of many proposed solutions. To address this issue, we consider a two-player bandit setting where the actions of one of the players affect the other player and we extend the Coase theorem [Coase, 1960]. This result shows that the optimal approach for maximizing the social welfare in the presence of externality is to establish property rights, i.e., enable transfers and bargaining between the players. Our work removes the classical assumption that bargainers possess perfect knowledge of the underlying game. We first demonstrate that in the absence of property rights, the social welfare breaks down. We then design a policy for the players which allows them to learn a bargaining strategy which maximizes the total welfare, recovering the Coase theorem under uncertainty.