Dottorato in DATA SCIENCE

Titolo della tesi: Pricing and Submodular Optimization in the real world

In applications, it may happen that real-world limitations hinder the practical applicability of well established theoretical frameworks. This happens for a variety of reasons, like the presence of computational bottlenecks or imperfect knowledge of the input. In other situations, e.g., adaptive exploration, the reality offers additional structure that standard theory fails to capture and exploit. In the last decades, these phenomena have motivated exciting lines of research, fostering extensive work from both theoreticians and practitioners. This thesis follows this path, studying real-world limitations and practical challenges for two fundamental problems: pricing in two-sided markets and submodular optimization. We adopt a rigorous theoretical approach, performing in some cases extensive experimental analysis to showcase the effectiveness of our techniques on real-world instances.