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In the \emph{tollbooth problem}, we are given a tree $\bT=(V,E)$ with $n$ edges, and a set of $m$ customers, each of whom is interested in purchasing a path on the tree. Each customer has a fixed budget, and the objective is to price the…
We consider the Max-Buying Problem with Limited Supply, in which there are $n$ items, with $C_i$ copies of each item $i$, and $m$ bidders such that every bidder $b$ has valuation $v_{ib}$ for item $i$. The goal is to find a pricing $p$ and…
Algorithmic pricing is the computational problem that sellers (e.g., in supermarkets) face when trying to set prices for their items to maximize their profit in the presence of a known demand. Guruswami et al. (2005) propose this problem…
Consider a customer who needs to fulfill a shopping list, and also a personal shopper who is willing to buy and resell to customers the goods in their shopping lists. It is in the personal shopper's best interest to find (shopping) routes…
We study the revenue guarantees and approximability of item pricing. Recent work shows that with $n$ heterogeneous items, item-pricing guarantees an $O(\log n)$ approximation to the optimal revenue achievable by any (buy-many) mechanism,…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Consider the following toy problem. There are $m$ rectangles and $n$ points on the plane. Each rectangle $R$ is a consumer with budget $B_R$, who is interested in purchasing the cheapest item (point) inside R, given that she has enough…
An instance of the tollbooth problem consists of an undirected network and a collection of single-minded customers, each of which is interested in purchasing a fixed path subject to an individual budget constraint. The objective is to…
We consider the revenue maximization problem with sharp multi-demand, in which $m$ indivisible items have to be sold to $n$ potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ is interested in getting exactly $d_i$ items, and each item $j$ gives a benefit…
We study approximation algorithms for revenue maximization based on static item pricing, where a seller chooses prices for various goods in the market, and then the buyers purchase utility-maximizing bundles at these given prices. We…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
When sales of a product are affected by randomness in demand, retailers can use dynamic pricing strategies to maximise their profits. In this article the pricing problem is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem, where the…
Buying and selling of data online has increased substantially over the last few years. Several frameworks have already been proposed that study query pricing in theory and practice. The key guiding principle in these works is the notion of…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
We consider the following two deterministic inventory optimization problems over a finite planning horizon $T$ with non-stationary demands. (a) Submodular Joint Replenishment Problem: This involves multiple item types and a single retailer…
Collaborative Vehicle Routing is where delivery companies cooperate by sharing their delivery information and performing delivery requests on behalf of each other. This achieves economies of scale and thus reduces cost, greenhouse gas…