Abstract
We consider a fundamental pricing problem in combinatorial auctions. We are given a set of indivisible items and a set of buyers with randomly drawn monotone valuations over subsets of items. A decision maker sets item prices and then the buyers make sequential purchasing decisions, taking their favorite set among the remaining items. We parametrize an instance by d, the size of the largest set a buyer may want. Our main result asserts that there exist prices such that the expected (over the random valuations) welfare of the allocation they induce is at least a factor 1/ (d+ 1 ) times the expected optimal welfare in hindsight. Moreover we prove that this bound is tight. Thus, our result not only improves upon the 1/ (4 d- 2 ) bound of Dütting et al., but also settles the approximation that can be achieved by using item prices. We further show how to compute our prices in polynomial time. We provide additional results for the special case when buyers’ valuations are known (but a posted-price mechanism is still desired).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference, IPCO 2022 |
Editors | Karen Aardal, Laura Sanità |
Publisher | Springer Science+Business Media |
Pages | 126-139 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-031-06901-7 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-3-031-06900-0 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Event | 23rd International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2022 - Eindhoven, Netherlands Duration: 27 Jun 2022 → 29 Jun 2022 |
Publication series
Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
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Volume | 13265 LNCS |
ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
Conference | 23rd International Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization, IPCO 2022 |
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Country/Territory | Netherlands |
City | Eindhoven |
Period | 27/06/22 → 29/06/22 |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Keywords
- Combinatorial Auctions
- Online allocations