Advertisement
Published in:
2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
The Power of Fair Pricing Mechanisms
Authors : Christine Chung, Katrina Ligett, Kirk Pruhs, Aaron L. Roth
Published in: LATIN 2010: Theoretical Informatics
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
We explore the revenue capabilities of truthful, monotone (“fair”) allocation and pricing functions for resource-constrained auction mechanisms within a general framework that encompasses unlimited supply auctions, knapsack auctions, and auctions with general non-decreasing convex production cost functions. We study and compare the revenue obtainable in each fair pricing scheme to the profit obtained by the ideal omniscient multi-price auction. We show (1) for capacitated knapsack auctions, no constant pricing scheme can achieve any approximation to the optimal profit, but proportional pricing is as powerful as general monotone pricing, and (2) for auction settings with arbitrary bounded non-decreasing convex production cost functions, we present a proportional pricing mechanism which achieves a poly-logarithmic approximation. Unlike existing approaches, all of our mechanisms have fair (monotone) prices, and all of our competitive analysis is with respect to the optimal profit extraction.