Online Bilateral Trade With Minimal Feedback: Don't Waste Seller's Time

Online learning algorithms for designing optimal bilateral trade mechanisms have recently received significant attention. This paper addresses a key inefficiency in prior two-bit feedback models, which synchronously query both the buyer and the seller for their willingness to trade. This approach is inherently inefficient as it offers a trade to the seller even when the buyer rejects the offer. We propose an asynchronous mechanism that queries the seller only if the buyer has already accepted the offer. Consequently, the mechanism receives one bit of feedback from the buyer and a “censored” bit from the seller—a signal richer than the standard one-bit (trade/no-trade) feedback, but less informative than the two-bit model. Assuming independent valuations with bounded densities—the same distributional conditions underlying the two-bit results of Cesa-Bianchi et al. [2024a]—we design an algorithm that achieves ˜ O ( T 2 / 3 ) regret against the best fixed price in hindsight. This matches the lower bound for the strictly richer two-bit model, showing that our mechanism elicits the minimal feedback necessary to attain optimal rates.