Incentivizing Combinatorial Bandit Exploration

Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users prefer to exploit, the algorithm can incentivize them to explore by leveraging the information collected from the previous users. All published work on this problem, known as incentivized exploration, focuses on small, unstructured action sets and mainly targets the case when the users' beliefs are independent across actions. However, realistic exploration problems often feature large, structured action sets and highly correlated beliefs.