Related papers: Static pricing for multi-unit prophet inequalities
In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…
In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…
Prophet inequalities for rewards maximization are fundamental to optimal stopping theory with extensive applications to mechanism design and online optimization. We study the \emph{cost minimization} counterpart of the classical prophet…
We study a continuous and infinite time horizon counterpart to the classic prophet inequality, which we term the stationary prophet inequality problem. Here, copies of a good arrive and perish according to Poisson point processes. Buyers…
In this work we initiate the study of buy-and-sell prophet inequalities. We start by considering what is arguably the most fundamental setting. In this setting the online algorithm observes a sequence of prices one after the other. At each…
In a prophet inequality problem, $n$ independent random variables are presented to a gambler one by one. The gambler decides when to stop the sequence and obtains the most recent value as reward. We evaluate a stopping rule by the…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
This work is motivated by our collaboration with a large consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. We have found that while the company appreciates the advantages of dynamic pricing, they deem it operationally much easier to plan out a static…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…
Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…
We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…
We explore a prophet inequality problem, where the values of a sequence of items are drawn i.i.d. from some distribution, and an online decision maker must select one item irrevocably. We establish that $\mathrm{CR}_{\ell}$ the worst-case…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
We consider the problem of dynamic pricing with limited supply. A seller has $k$ identical items for sale and is facing $n$ potential buyers ("agents") that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each…
Prophet inequalities compare the expected performance of an online algorithm for a stochastic optimization problem to the expected optimal solution in hindsight. They are a major alternative to classic worst-case competitive analysis, of…
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…