Pricing Commodities, or How to Sell When Buyers Have Restricted Valuations

How should a seller price his goods in a market where each buyer prefers a single good among his desired goods, and will buy the cheapest such good, as long as it is within his budget? We provide efficient algorithms that compute near-optimal prices for this problem, focusing on a commodity market, where the range of buyer budgets is small. We also show that our technique (which is based on LP-rounding) easily extends to a different scenario, in which the buyers want to buy all the desired goods, as long as they are within budget.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WAOA
• Authors: Robert Krauthgamer, Aranyak Mehta, Atri Rudra
• Keywords: Algorithms, Buyer Budgets, Buyers, Seller Price, WAOA 2007