diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index b91e561..17a8c45 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -10,4 +10,85 @@ - +```mermaid +mindmap + PHANTOM((PHANTOM Project)) + North Star + Study how automated actors change markets + Build an experimentation platform for real-world-like commerce + Two-loop learning system + Online observation loop + Offline "defense gym" loop + Core Economic Questions + Price Discovery + How prices respond to demand signals + How signal quality changes with bots/agents + Demand & Elasticity + Shifts in willingness-to-pay + Short-run vs long-run elasticity + Market Efficiency & Welfare + Consumer surplus vs producer surplus + Deadweight loss from frictions/manipulation + Price Discrimination & Segmentation + Behavioral feature-based segmentation + Fairness vs profitability tradeoffs + Information Asymmetry + Agents amplify search and arbitrage + Sellers infer more about buyers; buyers infer more about sellers + Strategic Interaction + Consumers vs firms vs agents + Feedback loops: policy ↔ behavior ↔ price + Market Power & Competition + Algorithmic pricing as competitive tool + Risks: tacit coordination / "algorithmic collusion" + Externalities + Congestion and attention costs + Spillovers: one segment’s behavior affects others’ prices + System-Level View + Participants + Humans + Agents (automated buyers/actors) + Firms (pricing decision-makers) + Platform (measurement + control layer) + Markets Simulated + Repeated transactions + Limited inventory / capacity constraints (conceptually) + Time dynamics (learning over time) + Interventions + Pricing policies + Experiment assignment / randomized exposure + Agent behavioral policies (task-driven) + Measurement & Causal Inference + What is observed + Actions (search, click, purchase intent) + Context (product attributes, time, exposure) + Outcomes (conversion, revenue, churn proxies) + Identification strategy + A/B tests and randomization + Counterfactual baselines + Robustness checks (offline replay) + Key metrics + Revenue / profit proxies + Conversion & bounce + Price volatility / stability + Welfare proxies (e.g., dispersion, access) + Risk, Governance, and Ethics + Manipulation & Integrity + Bot-driven demand distortion + Measurement contamination + Fairness & Transparency + Differential pricing concerns + Explainability and auditability + Safety Constraints + Guardrails on price moves + Monitoring for runaway feedback loops + Outputs + Insights + When do agents raise/lower prices via behavior shifts? + Which market designs are robust to automation? + Defenses + Agent-aware pricing policies (robust control) + Detection + mitigation strategies (feature-level separability) + Platform Value + Reusable testbed for market + AI-agent research +```