Pricing multi-unit markets

Conference item

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.

Authors: Ezra, T; Feldman, M; Roughgarden, T; Suksompong, W

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer
• Host title: Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2018
• Pages: 140–153
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series number: 11316
• Publication date: 2018-11-21
• Acceptance date: 2018-09-24
• Event title: 14th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2018)
• Event location: Oxford, UK
• Event start date: 2018-12-15
• Event end date: 2018-12-17
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04612-5_10
• EISSN: 1611-3349
• ISSN: 0302-9743
• EISBN: 978-3-030-04612-5
• ISBN: 978-3-030-04611-8
• Language: English