2024/02/05 by Francesco Bacchiocchi, Bacchiocchi, Francesco, Francesco Emanuele Stradi +7
Physics and Astronomy · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2402.03077
openalex publication_date 2024/02/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In Bayesian persuasion, an informed sender strategically discloses information to a receiver so as to persuade them to undertake desirable actions. Recently, a growing attention has been devoted to settings in which sender and receivers interact sequentially. Recently, Markov persuasion processes (MPPs) have been introduced to capture sequential scenarios where a sender faces a stream of myopic receivers in a Markovian environment. The MPPs studied so far in the literature suffer from issues that prevent them from being fully operational in practice, e.g., they assume that the sender knows receivers' rewards. We fix such issues by addressing MPPs where the sender has no knowledge about the environment. We design a learning algorithm for the sender, working with partial feedback. We prove that its regret with respect to an optimal information-disclosure policy grows sublinearly in the number of episodes, as it is the case for the loss in persuasiveness cumulated while learning. Moreover, we provide a lower bound for our setting matching the guarantees of our algorithm.