Reaping the Benefits of Bundling under High Production Costs
Reaping the Benefits of Bundling under High Production Costs
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在高生产成本下收获捆绑的好处
DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Simchi
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Will Ma;D. Simchi
在经济学文献中，人们早就知道，将不同的商品捆绑销售可以显著增加收入，即使这些商品的估值是独立的。然而，如果商品的生产成本很高，捆绑销售就不再有利可图。为了解决这个问题，我们引入了纯捆绑与处置成本（PBDC），在购买捆绑后，我们允许客户返回任何子集的项目，为他们的生产成本。我们证明了使用经典的例子，PBDC捕获捆绑的集中效应，同时允许个人销售的灵活性，提取所有的消费者福利的情况下，以前的简单机制不能，此外，我们证明了理论上的保证PBDC的性能，适用于任意独立的分布，使用技术从机制设计文献。我们将成本问题转化为负估值问题，将机制设计技术扩展到负估值，并使用Babaioff等人的Core-Tail分解[BILW 14]来表明PBDC或个人销售将获得至少1/5.2的最优利润。这也改善了[BILW 14]的1/6界限。我们也推进了上界，构造了两个零成本的IID项目，其中混合捆绑比纯捆绑或单独销售多赚1.19。我们的数值实验表明，PBDC优于所有其他简单的定价方案，包括Chu等人在[CLS 11]中引入的捆绑大小定价（BSP）。在[CLS 11]中使用的相同分布族下。我们还为[CLS 11]中一些伟大的实验成功提供了第一个理论解释。总而言之，我们的工作表明PBDC是一种强大的，计算量最小的启发式算法，易于向客户推广。
It has long been known in the economics literature that selling different goods in a single bundle can significantly increase revenue, even when the valuations for the goods are independent. However, bundling is no longer profitable if the goods have high production costs. To overcome this issue, we introduce Pure Bundling with Disposal for Cost (PBDC), where after buying the bundle, we allow the customer to return any subset of items for their production cost. We demonstrate using classical examples that PBDC captures the concentration effects of bundling while allowing for the flexibility of individual sales, extracting all of the consumer welfare in situations where previous simple mechanisms could not.Furthermore, we prove a theoretical guarantee on the performance of PBDC that holds for arbitrary independent distributions, using techniques from the mechanism design literature. We transform the problem with costs to a problem with negative valuations, extend the mechanism design techniques to negative valuations, and use the Core-Tail decomposition of Babaioff et al. from [BILW14] to show that either PBDC or individual sales will obtain at least 1/5.2 of the optimal profit. This also improves the bound of 1/6 from [BILW14]. We advance the upper bound as well, constructing two IID items with zero cost where mixed bundling earns 1.19 more revenue than either pure bundling or individual sales.Our numerical experiments show that PBDC outperforms all other simple pricing schemes, including the Bundle-Size Pricing (BSP) introduced by Chu et al. in [CLS11], under the same families of distributions used in [CLS11]. We also provide the first theoretical explanation for some of the great experimental successes in [CLS11]. All in all, our work shows establishes PBDC as a robust, computationally-minimal heuristic that is easy to market to the customer.