Dynamic and Non-uniform Pricing Strategies for Revenue Maximization

We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with n items caters to m buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets the prices on individual items, and the price of a bundle of items is the sum of the prices of the individual items in the bundle. Each buyer buys a subset of yet unsold items so as to maximize her utility, defined as her valuation of the subset minus the price of the subset. Our goal is to design pricing strategies, possibly randomized, that guarantee an expected revenue that is within a small factor α of the maximum possible social welfare – an upper bound on the maximum revenue that can be generated by any pricing mechanism. Much of the earlier work has focused on the unlimited supply setting, where selling items to some buyer does not affect their availability to the future buyers. Recently, Balcan et. al. [4] studied the limited supply setting, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: FOCS
• Authors: Tanmoy Chakraborty, Zhiyi Huang, Sanjeev Khanna
• Keywords: FOCS 2009, Pricing, Theoretical Computer Science, Uniform Pricing Strategy, Unsold Items