OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We develop an econometric framework for recovering structural primitives—-such as marginal costs—-from price or quantity data generated by firms whose decisions are governed by reinforcement-learning algorithms. Guided by recent theory and simulations showing that such algorithms can learn to approximate repeated-game equilibria, we impose only the minimal optimality conditions implied by equilibrium, while remaining agnostic about the algorithms’ hidden design choices and the resulting conduct—-competitive, collusive, or anywhere in between. These weak restrictions yield set identification of the primitives; we characterise the resulting sets and construct estimators with valid confidence regions. Monte-Carlo simulations confirm that our bounds contain the true parameters across a wide range of algorithm specifications, and that the sets tighten substantially when exogenous demand variation across markets is exploited. The framework thus offers a practical tool for empirical analysis and regulatory assessment of algorithmic behaviour.