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<meta name="author" content="Daniel Alves Rösel">
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<div class="work-info">
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<h5>Thesis PDF</h5>
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<p>Latest public build of the full thesis document.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">IE University, 2025</span>
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<h5>PHANTOM Repository</h5>
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<p>Monorepo with paper source, platform code, and experiments.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">Open Source</span>
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<div class="work-info">
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<h5>P4P Interaction Layer</h5>
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<p>Reusable storefront and logging layer released for replication.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">Public Artifact</span>
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<a href="https://phantom-hotel.vercel.app" class="work-item" target="_blank">
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<div class="work-info">
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<h5>Hotel Mode Demo</h5>
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<p>Public deployment of the hotel-style experiment interface.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">Live Demo</span>
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<a href="https://phantom-airline.vercel.app" class="work-item" target="_blank">
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<div class="work-info">
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<h5>Airline Mode Demo</h5>
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<p>Public deployment of the airline-style experiment interface.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">Live Demo</span>
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</div>
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<div class="work-info">
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<h5>Goal Library</h5>
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<p>Task definitions used to assign actor objectives in experiments.</p>
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<span class="work-venue">Experiment Design</span>
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<h1 class="title is-1 publication-title">Pricing Heuristics Against Non-human Transaction Orchestration Mechanisms</h1>
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<div class="is-size-5 publication-authors">
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<span class="author-block">
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<a href="https://alves.world" target="_blank">Daniel Rösel</a></span>
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</div>
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<div class="is-size-5 publication-authors">
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<span class="author-block">IE University<br>Bachelor's Thesis 2025</span>
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<span class="eql-cntrb"><small><br>Advisor: Alberto Martín Izquierdo</small></span>
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<a href="https://pub-d5b94a3c29fd40c6b3881946e463fdb7.r2.dev/thesis-latest.pdf" target="_blank"
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<span>Paper</span>
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</span>
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<span class="link-block">
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<a href="https://github.com/velocitatem/PHANTOM" target="_blank"
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</div>
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</section>
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<div class="publication-banner">
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<img src="static/images/banner.svg" alt="PHANTOM teaser diagram connecting vulnerability, behavioral signal, and robust control" width="1920" height="1080" decoding="async" style="display:block; width:100%; height:auto;" onerror="this.onerror=null;this.src='static/images/carousel2.jpg';"/>
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</section>
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<!-- Paper abstract -->
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<section class="section hero is-light">
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<h2 class="title is-3">Abstract</h2>
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<div class="content has-text-justified">
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<p>
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PHANTOM formalizes a mechanism failure in dynamic pricing under non-human transaction orchestration. LLM-based agents can run reconnaissance in isolated sessions and execute purchases in clean sessions, reducing the platform's ability to extract the Cost of Information (COI), the premium usually generated by demand signal expression.
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</p>
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<p>
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The project combines behavioral modeling and robust control. We built a controlled e-commerce platform (hotel and airline modes), logged full interaction trajectories and price exposures, learned separable human/agent transition kernels, and used those signals to train contamination-aware pricing policies with a distributionally robust reinforcement learning objective.
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</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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<!-- End paper abstract -->
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<div class="container is-max-desktop">
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<div class="content has-text-justified">
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<h2 class="title is-3 has-text-centered">Project Scope</h2>
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<p>
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The current thesis revision extends both theory and implementation. The main research question is how a pricing system can preserve margin integrity when browsing and purchasing are increasingly orchestrated by AI agents.
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</p>
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||
<ul>
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<li>Formal contribution: a Cost of Information erosion theorem showing why price-query saturation can collapse dynamic pricing power.</li>
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<li>System contribution: a hybrid online/offline stack (Next.js storefront, pricing provider, Kafka event streams, Airflow ETL, Redis serving layer).</li>
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<li>Modeling contribution: class-specific transition kernels for human and agent behavior, with KL-divergence based separability scores.</li>
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<li>Control contribution: a contamination-aware DR-RL pricing policy trained under distributional uncertainty using Wasserstein-style robustness.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>
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Controlled trials currently include balanced human and agent sessions with goal-driven tasks across hotel and airline interfaces. Early separability results are strong (Mann-Whitney U=2.0, p=0.0006), while robust pricing gains remain regime-dependent and are being calibrated in larger sweeps.
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</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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<!-- Image carousel -->
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<div class="hero-body">
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<div id="results-carousel" class="carousel results-carousel">
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<div class="item">
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<img src="static/images/carousel1.jpg" alt="First research result visualization" loading="lazy"/>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">
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Early simulator traces showing how policy choice can push prices toward aggressive high-end regimes.
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</h2>
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</div>
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<div class="item">
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<img src="static/images/carousel2.jpg" alt="Second research result visualization" loading="lazy"/>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">
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Human and agent behavior diverge at the transition-kernel level, enabling usable session-level separability.
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</h2>
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</div>
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<div class="item">
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<img src="static/images/carousel3.jpg" alt="Third research result visualization" loading="lazy"/>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">
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End-to-end architecture linking web interactions, pricing queries, event streams, and model updates.
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</h2>
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</div>
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<div class="item">
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<img src="static/images/carousel4.jpg" alt="Fourth research result visualization" loading="lazy"/>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">
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Contamination-aware evaluation compares robust and non-robust pricing behavior across alpha sweeps.
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</h2>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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<h2 class="title is-3">Defense Scenes</h2>
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<div id="videos-carousel" class="carousel results-carousel">
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<div class="item item-video1">
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<video poster="" id="video1" controls muted loop height="100%" preload="metadata">
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<source src="static/videos/COIFirstPrinciplesScene.mp4" type="video/mp4">
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</video>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">COI from first principles.</h2>
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</div>
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<div class="item item-video2">
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<img src="static/images/banner.svg" alt="PHANTOM unified teaser banner" width="1920" height="1080" decoding="async" style="display:block; width:100%; height:auto;" onerror="this.onerror=null;this.src='static/images/carousel2.jpg';"/>
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">Unified teaser: vulnerability, behavioral kernels, and robust control loop.</h2>
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</div>
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<div class="item item-video3">
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<h2 class="subtitle has-text-centered">Distributionally robust control loop.</h2>
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<pre id="bibtex-code"><code>@thesis{Rosel2025PHANTOM,
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title={Pricing Heuristics Against Non-human Transaction Orchestration Mechanisms},
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author={Rösel, Daniel},
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school={IE University},
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year={2025},
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address={Madrid, Spain},
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type={Bachelor's Thesis},
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note={Advisor: Alberto Mart{\'i}n Izquierdo}
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