arXivDaily arXiv每日学术速递 周一至周五更新
arXiv 1108.4142cs.GTcs.DScs.LG
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有限供给下的动态定价

Dynamic Pricing with Limited Supply

Microsoft Research Silicon Valley(微软研究院硅谷);University of Southern California(南加州大学);Cornell University(康奈尔大学)

Moshe Babaioff, Shaddin Dughmi, Robert Kleinberg, Aleksandrs Slivkins

摘要:

研究了有限供给下的动态定价问题。卖方有$k$相同的物品出售,并且面对顺序到达的$n$潜在买方(“代理”)。每个代理商都有兴趣购买一件商品。每个代理的项目值是来自某个固定分布的IID样本,支持$[0,1]$。卖方向每个到达的代理人提供一个要么接受要么放弃的价格(不同的代理人可能会有不同的价格),目的是最大化他的预期收入。我们专注于“优先级独立”的机制--不使用任何关于分布的信息。它们是可取的,因为在许多实际情况下,知道分布是不现实的。我们研究如何收入的这种机制相比,最佳的离线机制,知道的分布(“离线基准”)的收入。我们提出了一个优先独立的动态定价机制,其收入是最多$O((k \log n)^{2/3})$低于离线基准,为每一个分布是定期的。事实上,如果将基准放宽到固定价格机制,这种保证在没有任何假设的情况下都成立。此外,我们证明了一个匹配的下界。如果$k/n$足够小,则相同机制的性能保证可以改进为具有分布依赖常数的$O(\sqrt{k} \log n)$。我们表明,在最坏的情况下,在所有的需求分布,这基本上是最好的速度,可以得到一个分布特定的常数。在技术层面上,我们利用与多武装匪徒(MAB)的联系。虽然无限供应的动态定价可以很容易地被视为MAB问题,但当应用于有限供应的设置时,MAB方法背后的直觉就被打破了。我们的高层次概念贡献是,即使是有限的供应设置可以卓有成效地处理作为一个强盗问题。

英文摘要:

We consider the problem of dynamic pricing with limited supply. A seller has $k$ identical items for sale and is facing $n$ potential buyers ("agents") that are arriving sequentially. Each agent is interested in buying one item. Each agent's value for an item is an IID sample from some fixed distribution with support $[0,1]$. The seller offers a take-it-or-leave-it price to each arriving agent (possibly different for different agents), and aims to maximize his expected revenue. We focus on "prior-independent" mechanisms -- ones that do not use any information about the distribution. They are desirable because knowing the distribution is unrealistic in many practical scenarios. We study how the revenue of such mechanisms compares to the revenue of the optimal offline mechanism that knows the distribution ("offline benchmark"). We present a prior-independent dynamic pricing mechanism whose revenue is at most $O((k \log n)^{2/3})$ less than the offline benchmark, for every distribution that is regular. In fact, this guarantee holds without *any* assumptions if the benchmark is relaxed to fixed-price mechanisms. Further, we prove a matching lower bound. The performance guarantee for the same mechanism can be improved to $O(\sqrt{k} \log n)$, with a distribution-dependent constant, if $k/n$ is sufficiently small. We show that, in the worst case over all demand distributions, this is essentially the best rate that can be obtained with a distribution-specific constant. On a technical level, we exploit the connection to multi-armed bandits (MAB). While dynamic pricing with unlimited supply can easily be seen as an MAB problem, the intuition behind MAB approaches breaks when applied to the setting with limited supply. Our high-level conceptual contribution is that even the limited supply setting can be fruitfully treated as a bandit problem.

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