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Pricing commodities

Published: 01 February 2011 Publication History

Abstract

How should a seller price her 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 LP rounding based technique easily extends to a different scenario, in which the buyers want to buy all the desired goods, as long as they are within budget.

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    Published In

    cover image Theoretical Computer Science
    Theoretical Computer Science  Volume 412, Issue 7
    February, 2011
    78 pages

    Publisher

    Elsevier Science Publishers Ltd.

    United Kingdom

    Publication History

    Published: 01 February 2011

    Author Tags

    1. Approximation algorithms
    2. Combinatorial bidding
    3. LP rounding
    4. Pricing
    5. Revenue maximization
    6. Single-minded bidders
    7. Unit-demand bidders

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    • (2017)A Sublogarithmic Approximation for Tollbooth Pricing on TreesMathematics of Operations Research10.1287/moor.2016.080342:2(377-388)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
    • (2015)Hardness of Graph Pricing Through Generalized Max-DicutProceedings of the forty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing10.1145/2746539.2746549(391-399)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
    • (2014)Online pricing for bundles of multiple itemsJournal of Global Optimization10.1007/s10898-013-0043-458:2(377-387)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2014
    • (2013)Improved Approximation Algorithms for the Spanning Star Forest ProblemAlgorithmica10.1007/s00453-011-9607-165:3(498-516)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
    • (2012)Online pricing for multi-type of itemsProceedings of the 6th international Frontiers in Algorithmics, and Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management10.1007/978-3-642-29700-7_8(82-92)Online publication date: 14-May-2012

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