Title
Posted Price Mechanisms for a Random Stream of Customers.
Abstract
Posted price mechanisms constitute a widely used way of selling items to strategic consumers. Although suboptimal, the attractiveness of these mechanisms comes from their simplicity and easy implementation. In this paper, we investigate the performance of posted price mechanisms when customers arrive in an unknown random order. We compare the expected revenue of these mechanisms to the expected revenue of the optimal auction in two different settings. Namely, the nonadaptive setting in which all offers are sent to the customers beforehand, and the adaptive setting in which an offer is made when a consumer arrives. For the nonadaptive case, we obtain a strategy achieving an expected revenue within at least a 1-1/e fraction of that of the optimal auction. We also show that this bound is tight, even if the customers have i.i.d. valuations for the item. For the adaptive case, we exhibit a posted price mechanism that achieves a factor 0.745 of the optimal revenue, when the customers have i.i.d. valuations for the item. Furthermore, we prove that our results extend to the prophet inequality setting and in particular our result for i.i.d. random valuations resolves a problem posed by Hill and Kertz. [13]
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3033274.3085137
EC
Keywords
Field
DocType
Posted prices, Prophet inequality, Mechanism design
Revenue,Approximation algorithm,Price mechanism,Computer science,Microeconomics,Common value auction,Mechanism design,Inequality,Valuation (finance),Revenue equivalence
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
14
0.72
9
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
José R. Correa1173.16
Patricio Foncea2140.72
Ruben Hoeksma3338.23
Tim Oosterwijk4151.76
tjark vredeveld5282.55