论文标题
在线发布定价,并带有未知的时间缩短的估值
Online Posted Pricing with Unknown Time-Discounted Valuations
论文作者
论文摘要
我们研究了设计发布价格机制的问题,以便在有限的时间内出售单个单元的单个单位。出于现实世界中的问题,例如,例如,房间和公寓的长期租金,我们假设客户根据泊松过程在线到达,并且他们的估值是从未知的分布中获得的,并且随着时间的推移而折现。我们根据竞争比率评估了我们的机制,衡量其收入与知道估值分布的最佳机制之间的最差比率。首先,我们专注于相同的估值设置,在该设置中,所有客户都以相同的数量重视项目。在这种情况下,我们提供了一个机制M_C,该机制可实现最佳的竞争比率,讨论了在线性折扣的情况下对参数的依赖性。然后,我们切换到随机评估设置。我们表明,如果我们将注意力限制在具有单调危险率的估值分布中,则M_C的竞争比率是由不取决于分布的严格正常常数下降的。此外,我们提供了另一种称为M_PC的机制,该机制由分段恒定定价策略定义,并达到与使用M_C获得的性能相当的性能。当卖方无法频繁更改发布的价格时,这种机制很有用。最后,我们在许多实验环境中凭经验评估了我们机制的性能。
We study the problem of designing posted-price mechanisms in order to sell a single unit of a single item within a finite period of time. Motivated by real-world problems, such as, e.g., long-term rental of rooms and apartments, we assume that customers arrive online according to a Poisson process, and their valuations are drawn from an unknown distribution and discounted over time. We evaluate our mechanisms in terms of competitive ratio, measuring the worst-case ratio between their revenue and that of an optimal mechanism that knows the distribution of valuations. First, we focus on the identical valuation setting, where all the customers value the item for the same amount. In this setting, we provide a mechanism M_c that achieves the best possible competitive ratio, discussing its dependency on the parameters in the case of linear discount. Then, we switch to the random valuation setting. We show that, if we restrict the attention to distributions of valuations with a monotone hazard rate, then the competitive ratio of M_c is lower bounded by a strictly positive constant that does not depend on the distribution. Moreover, we provide another mechanism, called M_pc, which is defined by a piecewise constant pricing strategy and reaches performances comparable to those obtained with M_c. This mechanism is useful when the seller cannot change the posted price too often. Finally, we empirically evaluate the performances of our mechanisms in a number of experimental settings.