首页|The menu-size complexity of revenue approximation

The menu-size complexity of revenue approximation

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Consider a monopolist selling n items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions F-1, F-2, ..., F-n possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the revenue-optimal selling mechanism (a pricing scheme) may be complex, sometimes requiring a continuum of menu entries. Also known is that simple mechanisms with a bounded number of menu entries can extract a constant fraction of the optimal revenue. Nonetheless, whether an arbitrarily high fraction of the optimal revenue can be extracted via a bounded menu size remained open. We give an affirmative answer: for every n and epsilon > 0, there exists C = C(n, epsilon) s.t. mechanisms of menu size at most C suffice for obtaining (1 - epsilon) of the optimal revenue from any F-1, ..., F-n. We prove upper and lower bounds on the revenue-approximation complexity C(n, epsilon) and on the deterministic communication complexity required to run a mechanism achieving such an approximation. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mechanism designRevenue maximizationApproximate revenue maximizationMenu sizeAuctionCommunication complexityMECHANISM

Babaioff, Moshe、Gonczarowski, Yannai A.、Nisan, Noam

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Einstein Inst Math

Hebrew Univ Jerusalem

2022

Games and economic behavior

Games and economic behavior

SSCI
ISSN:0899-8256
年,卷(期):2022.134
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