Pricing Multi-unit Markets

We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed with posted prices, under a range of assumptions about the d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWeb and Internet Economics Vol. 11316; pp. 140 - 153
Main Authors Ezra, Tomer, Feldman, Michal, Roughgarden, Tim, Suksompong, Warut
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2018
Springer International Publishing
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
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Summary:We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed with posted prices, under a range of assumptions about the designer’s information and agents’ valuations. Our results provide insights about the relative power of uniform and non-uniform prices, the relative difficulty of different valuation classes, and the implications of different informational assumptions. Among other results, we prove constant-factor guarantees for agents with (symmetric) subadditive valuations, even in an incomplete-information setting and with uniform prices.
ISBN:9783030046118
3030046117
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-04612-5_10