相关论文: Optimal Pricing is Hard

The competition complexity of an auction setting is the number of additional bidders needed such that the simple mechanism of selling items separately (with additional bidders) achieves greater revenue than the optimal but complex…

We study the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller…

We study the problem of learning the optimal item pricing for a unit-demand buyer with independent item values, and the learner has query access to the buyer's value distributions. We consider two common query models in the literature: the…

Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…

We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…

Consider a seller with m heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer whose values for the items are arbitrarily correlated. It was previously shown that, in such settings, distributions exist for which the seller's optimal…

The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be…

We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…

Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…

In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…

We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

We study the problem of learning revenue-optimal multi-bidder auctions from samples when the samples of bidders' valuations can be adversarially corrupted or drawn from distributions that are adversarially perturbed. First, we prove tight…

We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…

We study the classic single-item auction setting of Myerson, but under the assumption that the buyers' values for the item are distributed over finite supports. Using strong LP duality and polyhedral theory, we rederive various key results…

Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…

We design algorithms for computing approximately revenue-maximizing {\em sequential posted-pricing mechanisms (SPM)} in $K$-unit auctions, in a standard Bayesian model. A seller has $K$ copies of an item to sell, and there are $n$ buyers,…

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…

Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…

We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…