Lower Bounds on Revenue of Approximately Optimal Auctions
release_2l3ukhiiqfg3zh2dbym5rdqsfq
by
Balasubramanian Sivan and Vasilis Syrgkanis and Omer Tamuz
2012
Abstract
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single
posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers'
valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting,
with values drawn from an arbitrary joint distribution. Specifically, we show
that a single price drawn from the distribution of the maximum valuation Vmax =
max V_1, V_2, ...,V_n achieves a revenue of at least a 1/e fraction of the
geometric expecation of Vmax. This generic bound is a measure of how revenue
improves/degrades as a function of the concentration/spread of Vmax.
We further show that in absence of buyers' valuation distributions,
recruiting an additional set of identical bidders will yield a similar
guarantee on revenue. Finally, our bound also gives a measure of the extent to
which one can simultaneously approximate welfare and revenue in terms of the
concentration/spread of Vmax.
In text/plain
format
Archived Files and Locations
application/pdf 110.6 kB
file_woj7ipycpjenpo57nmg62szzpu
|
authors.library.caltech.edu (web) web.archive.org (webarchive) archive.org (archive) |
1210.0275v1
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)