Customer-individual bundling and auction design in revenue management

这个项目的重点是动态定价，更具体地说，多产品市场的拍卖设计。组合拍卖是最一般类型的拍卖机制，因为它们允许不同类型的效用函数，包括补充和替代。在这个研究项目中，我们想要探索组合拍卖中两个密切相关的研究问题。首先，我们想要分析边约束(如对获胜者数量的限制)对拍卖形式效率的影响，并分析考虑了边约束的上升拍卖的新定价规则。这种侧约束是该领域中大多数应用的前提条件，但在理论上很少受到关注。其次，我们希望研究在线环境，在这种环境下，商品会定期出售，但每个时期的确切竞价人数都是未知的，有时甚至无法获得有关其他竞争对手估值的分布信息。这种环境不同于独立的私人价值模型，后者一直是许多理论的基础，但与收入管理文献中分析的环境相似。然而，在线设置可能为收入管理中的许多新应用提供了更好的描述，在这些应用中，组合拍卖被定期使用来买卖易腐烂的物品。例如出售电视和广播广告，许多采购拍卖，或出售飞往特定目的地的航班。除了理论开发外，我们还计划在实验室分析两种情况下的投标人行为，并开发各自的软件工具。

This project focuses on dynamic pricing, more specifically auction designs for multi-product markets. Combinatorial auctions are the most general types of auction mechanisms, as they allow for different types of utility functions including complements and substitutes. In this research project, we want to explore two closely related research questions in combinatorial auctions. First, we want to analyze the impact of side constraints (such as limits on the number of winners) on the efficiency of auction formats and analyze new pricing rules for ascending auctions, which take side constraints into account. Such side constraints are a precondition for most applications in the field, but they have received little attention in the theory. Second, we want to study online environments, where goods are sold periodically, but the exact number of bidders is unknown in each period and sometimes not even distributional information about the valuations of other competitors is available. This environment is different to the independent private values model, which has been the basis for much of the theory, but similar to environments as they are analyzed in the revenue management literature. Online settings might, however, provide a much better description for many new applications in revenue management, where combinatorial auctions are used periodically to buy or sell perishable items. Examples are the sale of TV and Radio ads, many procurement auctions, or the sale of flights to particular destinations. In addition to theory development, we plan to analyze bidder behavior in both settings in the lab and develop respective software tools.