How to Sell Through Mail Order

How to Sell Wars

On 17 March 1813 King Frederick William III of Prussia issued his appeal “to my people.” It was a call to arms for the struggle against Napoleon, a war of liberation, “...It is the final, decisive struggle that we must endure, for the sake of our existence, our independence, our fortune. There is no way out except an honorable peace, or glorious defeat.” The proclamation appeared in the newspap...

How to "Sell" Your Paper to a Peer-reviewed Journal.

How to Sell a Graph: Guidelines for Graph Retailers

We consider a profit maximization problem where we are asked to price a set of m items that are to be assigned to a set of n customers. The items can be represented as the edges of an undirected (multi)graph G, where an edge multiplicity larger than one corresponds to multiple copies of the same item. Each customer is interested in purchasing a bundle of edges of G, and we assume that each bund...

Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods

We consider the question of protecting the privacy of customers buying digital goods. More specifically, our goal is to allow a buyer to purchase digital goods from a vendor without letting the vendor learn what, and to the extent possible also when and how much, it is buying. We propose solutions which allow the buyer, after making an initial deposit, to engage in an unlimited number of priced...

How to Sell Hyperedges: The Hypermatching Assignment Problem

We are given a set of clients with budget constraints and a set of indivisible items. Each client is willing to buy one or more bundles of (at most) k items each (bundles can be seen as hyperedges in a k-hypergraph). If client i gets a bundle e, she pays bi,e and yields a net profit wi,e. The Hypermatching Assignment Problem (HAP) is to assign a set of pairwise disjoint bundles to clients so as...