Posted pricing and prophet inequalities with inaccurate priors

Dütting, Paul and Kesselheim, Thomas (2019) Posted pricing and prophet inequalities with inaccurate priors. In: 20th ACM conference on Economics and Computation, 2019-06-24 - 2019-06-28, Phoenix, United States, USA.

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Abstract

In posted pricing, one defines prices for items (or other outcomes), buyers arrive in some order and take their most preferred bundle among the remaining items. Over the last years, our understanding of such mechanisms has improved considerably. The standard assumption is that the mechanism has exact knowledge of probability distribution the buyers’ valuations are drawn from. The prices are then set based on this knowledge. We examine to what extent existing results and techniques are robust to inaccurate prior beliefs. That is, the prices are chosen with respect to similar but different probability distributions. We focus on the question of welfare maximization. We consider all standard distance measures on probability distributions, and derive tight bounds on the welfare guarantees that can be derived for all standard techniques in the various metrics

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Official URL:	https://sigecom.org/ec19/
Additional Information:	© 2019 The Author
Divisions:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Date Deposited:	29 May 2019 15:15
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 04:59
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/100766

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