论文标题
灵活性有限的IID先知不平等
The IID Prophet Inequality with Limited Flexibility
论文作者
论文摘要
在在线销售中,卖家通常会以收视率或方式为每个潜在的买家提供张贴的价格。买家有时可以看到其他买家面临的张贴价格,并且经常更改价格可能不公平。有关发布价格机制和先知不平等问题的文献研究了定价政策的两个极端,固定价格政策和完全动态的定价。前者的收入是次优的,但被认为比后者更公平。这项工作检查了中间情况,其中最多有$ k $的价格在销售范围内。使用具有独立和相同分布的随机变量的先知不平等框架,我们为最多使用$ k $阈值的策略提出了一种新的先知不平等。我们以$ k $的价格呈现渐近结果,并以$ k $的少量值提供结果。对于$ k = 2美元的价格,我们比最佳固定价格解决方案的提高至少为$ 11 \%$。此外,$ k = 5 $价格足以保证使用使用任意价格的完全动态政策获得的近似因素的近99美元。从技术角度来看,我们在分析中使用了无限维线性程序。这种表述可能引起其他在线选择问题的独立兴趣。
In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The literature on posted price mechanisms and prophet inequality problems has studied the two extremes of pricing policies, the fixed price policy and fully dynamic pricing. The former is suboptimal in revenue but is perceived as fairer than the latter. This work examines the middle situation, where there are at most $k$ distinct prices over the selling horizon. Using the framework of prophet inequalities with independent and identically distributed random variables, we propose a new prophet inequality for strategies that use at most $k$ thresholds. We present asymptotic results in $k$ and results for small values of $k$. For $k=2$ prices, we show an improvement of at least $11\%$ over the best fixed-price solution. Moreover, $k=5$ prices suffice to guarantee almost $99\%$ of the approximation factor obtained by a fully dynamic policy that uses an arbitrary number of prices. From a technical standpoint, we use an infinite-dimensional linear program in our analysis; this formulation could be of independent interest to other online selection problems.