Improved Revenue Bounds for Posted-Price and Second-Price Mechanisms

Posted-Price Mechanisms

Introduction to Posted-Price Mechanisms

In the space of designs by which to auction off a single good, we have seen that there is a significant difference between a payment scheme that charges the second-highest bid, and one in which bidders pay their bids. In this lecture, we introduce a new payment and allocation scheme, called the posted-price mechanism, in which the auctioneer announces (i.e., posts) the price π at which they are...

Revenue Optimization in Posted-Price Auctions with Strategic Buyers

We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for posted-price auctions with strategic buyers. We analyze a very broad family of monotone regret minimization algorithms for this problem, which includes the previously best known algorithm, and show that no algorithm in that family admits a strategic regret more favorable than Ω( √ T ). We then introduce a new algorithm that achieves a strate...

Detail-free, Posted-Price Mechanisms for Limited Supply Online Auctions

We consider online posted-price mechanisms with limited supply. A seller has k items for sale and is facing n potential buyers (“agents”) that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each agent’s value for an item is an IID sample from some fixed distribution with support [0, 1]. The seller offers a take-it-or-leave-it price to each arriving agent (possibly diffe...

Opaque Distribution Channels for Competing Service Providers: Posted Price vs. Name-Your-Own-Price Mechanisms

We consider a two stage model to study the impact of different selling mechanisms of an opaque reseller on competing travel service providers, who face both leisure and business customers. While leisure travelers learn of their need to travel in the first stage, business travelers learn of this need in the second stage. Business travelers have a higher willingness to pay than leisure travelers,...