{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,11]],"date-time":"2025-12-11T03:02:40Z","timestamp":1765422160730},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"01","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]],"date-time":"2019-07-17T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1563321600000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.aaai.org"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Feedback-based reputation systems are widely deployed in E-commerce systems. Evidences showed that earning a reputable label (for sellers of such systems) may take a substantial amount of time and this implies a reduction of profit. We propose to enhance sellers\u2019 reputation via price discounts. However, the challenges are: (1) The demands from buyers depend on both the discount and reputation; (2) The demands are unknown to the seller. To address these challenges, we first formulate a profit maximization problem via a semiMarkov decision process (SMDP) to explore the optimal trade-offs in selecting price discounts. We prove the monotonicity of the optimal profit and optimal discount. Based on the monotonicity, we design a QLFP (Q-learning with forward projection) algorithm, which infers the optimal discount from historical transaction data. We conduct experiments on a dataset from to show that our QLFP algorithm improves the profit by as high as 50% over both the classical Q-learning and speedy Q-learning algorithm. Our QLFP algorithm also improves the profit by as high as four times over the case of not providing any price discount.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v33i01.33017992","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,8,22]],"date-time":"2019-08-22T07:42:46Z","timestamp":1566459766000},"page":"7992-7999","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":5,"title":["Optimizing Discount and Reputation Trade-Offs in E-Commerce Systems: Characterization and Online Learning"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"33","author":[{"given":"Hong","family":"Xie","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Yongkun","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"John C. S.","family":"Lui","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/4800\/4678","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/4800\/4678","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2022,11,7]],"date-time":"2022-11-07T06:50:46Z","timestamp":1667803846000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/4800"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"01","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,23]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v33i01.33017992","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,7,17]]}}}