chore: improve lit reviwe tweaks

paper/src/chapters/02-literature-review.tex

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 \section{Literature Review}
 
-To situate the work we review agents and agentic computer use, web automation, economic reasoning, and strategic interaction, then turn to data-driven dynamic pricing under uncertainty. The main technical risk is not ``agents buying things'' in isolation but agents reshaping the behavioral and demand signals on which downstream pricing depends. Related litigation is already underway---for example \textcite{noauthor_amazoncom_2026} under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Mediating actors also revive classic concerns such as false-name bidding \parencite{yokoo_effect_2004}; pseudonymous re-entry can whitewash reputation and weaken defenses \parencite{feldman_free-riding_2004}. Dynamic pricing assumes demand proxies are behaviorally meaningful, whereas classical bot detection targets security and access control. The gap we target is a principled way to separate non-human reconnaissance from genuine human demand expression and to fold that signal into pricing without degrading legitimate users (we track harm with a user-experience index), for the stakeholders named in the introduction.
+To situate the work we review agents and agentic computer use, web automation, economic reasoning, and strategic interaction, then turn to data-driven dynamic pricing under uncertainty. The main technical risk is not ``agents buying things'' in isolation but agents reshaping the behavioral and demand signals on which downstream pricing depends. Related litigation is already underway---for example \textcite{noauthor_amazoncom_2026} under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Mediating actors surface classic concerns such as false-name bidding \parencite{yokoo_effect_2004} or pseudonymous re-entry which can whitewash reputation and weaken defenses \parencite{feldman_free-riding_2004}. Dynamic pricing assumes demand proxies are behaviorally meaningful, whereas classical bot detection targets security and access control. The gap we target is a principled way to separate non-human reconnaissance from genuine human demand expression and to fold that signal into pricing without degrading legitimate users (we track harm with a user-experience index), for the stakeholders named in the introduction.
 
 \subsection{Agent Taxonomy and Definitions}
 
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ A HAP (HTTP Agent Profile) protocol has been developed as an internet draft by \
 
 Contamination in dynamic pricing systems that observe demand features to update prices appears across several industries. Aviation (about 24\% of observed disruptions in one industry survey) illustrates how malicious or scripted traffic can skew KPIs visible in look-to-book metrics. Excessive reconnaissance traffic inflates search volume without corresponding completed bookings, thereby skewing demand forecasts and disrupting dynamic pricing models. Demand proxies have also been observed to cause significant threat to inventory management by creating artificial scarcity that distorts the demand-supply relationships in the enterprise model. Censored demand as shown by \textcite{amjad_censored_2017} can also be observed in low-bias demand under-estimation caused by a distortion effect coming from non-human traffic data \parencite{imperva_rapid_2025}.
 
-When dynamic pricing algorithms train on highly contaminated or noisy data, mis-inference risk rises. Mis-specified reward and regret signals can push prices down to preserve volume, eroding margins, while misfit to legitimate demand can produce the opposite failure mode; both call for guardrails that preserve commercial intent \parencite{mullapudi_reinforcement_2025}.
+When dynamic pricing algorithms train on highly contaminated or noisy data, mis-inference risk rises and revenue is threatened. Mis-specified reward and regret signals can push prices down to preserve volume, eroding margins, while misfit to legitimate demand can produce the opposite failure mode where both call for guardrails that preserve commercial intent \parencite{mullapudi_reinforcement_2025}.
 
 
 %Documented instances of agent-driven market disruptions - Quantitative evidence of pricing manipulation - Case studies from affected industries
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ When dynamic pricing algorithms train on highly contaminated or noisy data, mis-
 
 Like in classical revenue-maximizing auctions \parencite{roughgarden_cs364a_2013} we assume that the human actor in our system has a private valuation $v$ which we formally draw from intrinsically defined distributions. The important note here is that the agent proxy does not have a mechanism to convey this private information into the demand data which directly impacts the pricing systems.
 
-The mediation between agents and commercial platforms turns on transaction costs of information gathering and negotiation. \textcite{shahidi_coasean_2025} argue these costs tend toward zero (we give a complementary formal result in Section~3). \textcite{coase_nature_1937} treats search and participation time as central to Coasean transaction costs, including discovery of relevant prices. Price discovery without AI intermediaries is already costly; we extend the classical Coasean logic to AI-mediated markets.
+The mediation between agents and commercial platforms turns on transaction costs of information gathering and negotiation. \textcite{shahidi_coasean_2025} argue these costs tend toward zero (we give a complementary formal result in Section~3). \textcite{coase_nature_1937} treats search and participation time as central to Coasean transaction costs, including discovery of relevant prices. Price discovery without AI intermediaries is already costly. We extend this classical Coasean logic to AI-mediated markets.
 
 % Economic foundations: relating the problem to options pricing theory. Cost of Information (COI) concept and its relevance
 
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ Our effort to combat contamination stems from research by \textcite{hardt_strate
 
 To bridge the gap between detection and robust pricing, we look at work in Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). As defined by \textcite{kuhn_wasserstein_2024}, DRO provides a framework for decision-making under ambiguity, where the true data distribution is unknown but lies within a ``Wasserstein ball'' of a target distribution. In our context, the ``ambiguity set'' represents the uncertainty introduced by agentic reconnaissance. By optimizing for the worst-case distribution within this set, pricing mechanisms can become resilient to the distributional shifts such as the ones caused by non-human actors, effectively robustifying the revenue function against the contamination described in our problem statement.
 
-To build an environment where prices face a demand estimate from a behavioral model, we draw on RecSim \parencite{ie_recsim_2019}. Modeling user behavior as partially observable Markov decision processes yields synthetic interaction that generalizes past the usual cold-start limit of per-user data. We translate RecSim-style user choice modeling into per-class transition models (human versus agent). Dynamic Bayesian networks remain a tractability option for the full platform. RecSim's main contribution is a sandbox for recommender learners; we adapt that idea to dynamic pricing under contamination.
+To build an environment where prices face a demand estimate from a behavioral model, we draw on RecSim \parencite{ie_recsim_2019}. Modeling user behavior as partially observable Markov decision processes yields synthetic interaction that generalizes past the usual cold-start limit of per-user data. We translate RecSim-style user choice modeling into per-class transition models (human versus agent). Dynamic Bayesian networks remain a tractability option for the full platform. RecSim's main contribution is a sandbox for recommender learners and we adapt that idea to dynamic pricing under contamination into a sort of contaminated pricing simulator.
 % TODO: mention https://github.com/meta-pytorch/OpenEnv/tree/main/envs/browsergym_env
 
 We also acknowledge the difficulty in similarly affected fields such as authorship, where \textcite{ganie_uncertainty_2025} demonstrate the theoretical limits of the distributional divergence between text authored by a human or large language model. Their approach of computing the divergence between two distributions demonstrates purely theoretically that no classifier can outperform random guessing on their particular task. This is yet another factor to take into consideration when exploring the potential mitigation strategies.