On the Computational Complexity of Optimal Simple Mechanisms
On the Computational Complexity of Optimal Simple Mechanisms
复制标题
关于最优简单机构的计算复杂性
DOI:
10.1145/2840728.2840736
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发表时间:
2015
期刊:
影响因子:
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通讯作者:
A. Rubinstein
中科院分区:
文献类型:
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作者:
A. Rubinstein
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [12], use menus of infinite size [9], and may be computationally intractable [8]. This has sparked recent interest in finding simple mechanisms that obtain reasonable approximations to the optimal revenue [10, 15, 3]. In this work we attempt to find the optimal simple mechanism. There are many ways to define simple mechanisms. Here we restrict our search to partition mechanisms, where the seller partitions the items into disjoint bundles and posts a price for each bundle; the buyer is allowed to buy any number of bundles. We give a PTAS for the problem of finding a revenue-maximizing partition mechanism, and prove that the problem is strongly NP-hard. En route, we prove structural properties of near-optimal partition mechanisms which may be of independent interest: for example, there always exists a near-optimal partition mechanism that uses only a constant number of non-trivial bundles (i.e. bundles with more than one item).
DOI:
10.1145/2764468.2764539
发表时间:
2014-09
期刊:
Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
影响因子:
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作者:
C. Daskalakis;Alan Deckelbaum;Christos Tzamos
通讯作者:
C. Daskalakis;Alan Deckelbaum;Christos Tzamos