Bilateral Trade Under Heavy-Tailed Valuations: Minimax Regret with Infinite Variance
About
We study contextual bilateral trade under full feedback when trader valuations have bounded density but infinite variance. We first extend the self-bounding property of Bachoc et al. (ICML 2025) from bounded to real-valued valuations, showing that the expected regret of any price $\pi$ satisfies $\mathbb{E}[g(m,V,W) - g(\pi,V,W)] \le L|m-\pi|^2$ under bounded density alone. Combining this with truncated-mean estimation, we prove that an epoch-based algorithm achieves regret $\widetilde{O}(T^{1-2\beta(p-1)/(\beta p + d(p-1))})$ when the noise has finite $p$-th moment for $p \in (1,2)$ and the market value function is $\beta$-H\"older, and we establish a matching $\Omega(\cdot)$ lower bound via Assouad's method with a smoothed moment-matching construction. Our results characterize the exact minimax rate for this problem, interpolating between the classical nonparametric rate at $p=2$ and the trivial linear rate as $p \to 1^+$.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regret Minimization | Bilateral Trade Nonparametric | Regret1 | 2 | |
| Regret Minimization | Bilateral Trade Parametric | Regret2 | 1 |