Asymptotically Optimal Welfare of Posted Pricing for Multiple Items with MHR Distributions
Abstract
We consider the problem of posting prices for unit-demand buyers if all buyers have identically distributed valuations drawn from a distribution with monotone hazard rate. We show that even with multiple items asymptotically optimal welfare can be guaranteed. Our main results apply to the case that either a buyer's value for different items are independent or that they are perfectly correlated. We give mechanisms using dynamic prices that obtain a -fraction of the optimal social welfare in expectation. Furthermore, we devise mechanisms that only use static item prices and are -competitive compared to the optimal social welfare. As we show, both guarantees are asymptotically optimal, even for a single item and exponential distributions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.00526,
title = {Asymptotically Optimal Welfare of Posted Pricing for Multiple Items with MHR Distributions},
author = {Alexander Braun and Matthias Buttkus and Thomas Kesselheim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.00526},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
To appear at the 29th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2021)