Bundling Customers: How to Exploit Trust Among Customers to Maximize Seller Profit
Elchanan Mossel, Omer Tamuz
备注：
11 pages, 1 figure. After posting the first version of this paper we learned that much of its mathematical content already appears in the literature, for example in "Multiproduct nonlinear pricing" by Armstrong (1996), although in a slightly different context of bundling products, rather than customers
We consider an auction of identical digital goods to customers whose valuations are drawn independently from known distributions. Myerson's classic result identifies the truthful mechanism that maximizes the seller's expected profit.
Under the assumption that in small groups customers can learn each others' valuations, we show how Myerson's result can be improved to yield a higher payoff to the seller using a mechanism that offers groups of customers to buy bundles of items.
It is well-known that selling different goods in a single bundle can significantly increase revenue. However, bundling is no longer profitable if the goods have high production costs. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new mechanism, Pure Bundling with Disposal for Cost (PBDC), where after buying the bundle, the customer is allowed to return any subset of goods for their costs. We provide two types of guarantees on the profit of PBDC mechanisms relative to the optimum in the presence of production costs, under the assumption that customers have valuations which are additive over the it…
Unlicensed spectrum has been viewed as a way to increase competition in wireless access and promote innovation in new technologies and business models. However, several recent papers have shown that the openness of such spectrum can also lead to it becoming over congested when used by competing wireless service providers (SPs). This in turn can result in the SPs making no profit and may deter them from entering the market. However, this prior work assumes that unlicensed access is a separate service from any service offered using licensed spectrum. Here, we instead consider the more common cas…
In this paper, we derive bounds for profit maximizing prior-free procurement auctions where a buyer wishes to procure multiple units of a homogeneous item from n sellers who are strategic about their per unit valuation. The buyer earns the profit by reselling these units in an external consumer market. The paper looks at three scenarios of increasing complexity. First, we look at unit capacity sellers where per unit valuation is private information of each seller and the revenue curve is concave. For this setting, we define two benchmarks. We show that no randomized prior free auction can be c…
With the emerging sensing technologies such as mobile crowdsensing and Internet of Things (IoT), people-centric data can be efficiently collected and used for analytics and optimization purposes. This data is typically required to develop and render people-centric services. In this paper, we address the privacy implication, optimal pricing, and bundling of people-centric services. We first define the inverse correlation between the service quality and privacy level from data analytics perspectives. We then present the profit maximization models of selling standalone, complementary, and substit…
We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller. How can the seller design a mechanism to maximize her profit? Two well-studied problems, revenue maximization in multi-item auctions and signaling in ad auctions, are special cases of our problem. We show that there exists a simple mechanism whose profit is at least $\frac{1}{44}$ of the optimal profit for multiple buyers with matroid-rank valuation functio…
We study the problem of selling a resource through an auction mechanism. The winning buyer in turn develops this resource to generate profit. Two forms of payment are considered: charging the winning buyer a one-time payment, or an initial payment plus a profit sharing contract (PSC). We consider a symmetric interdependent values model with risk averse or risk neutral buyers and a risk neutral seller. For the second price auction and the English auction, we show that the seller's expected total revenue from the auction where he also takes a fraction of the positive profit is higher than the ex…
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A double auction game with an infinite number of buyers and sellers is introduced. All sellers posses one unit of a good, all buyers desire to buy one unit. Each seller and each buyer has a private valuation of the good. The distribution of the valuations define supply and demand functions. One unit of the good is auctioned. At successive, discrete time instances, a player is randomly selected to make a bid (buyer) or an ask (seller). When the maximum of the bids becomes larger than the minimum of the asks, a transaction occurs and the auction is closed. The players have to choose the value of…
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Profit Reallocation Mechanisms in Tree-based Data Trading
CFCS, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机科学与技术学院前沿计算研究中心）；School of Economics, Peking University（北京大学经济学院）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an algorithmic pricing problem in which seller's costs are replaced with virtual costs, and the sellers' payments need only depend on the buyer's behavior and not the buyer's actual valuation function. Since the underlying algorithmic pricing problem may be difficult to solve optimally, we study specific models of buyer behavior and give mechanisms with provable ap…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan)（香港城市大学（东莞））
If you recommend a product to me and I buy it, how much should you be paid by the seller? And if your sole interest is to maximize the amount paid to you by the seller for a sequence of recommendations, how should you recommend optimally if I become more inclined to ignore you with each irrelevant recommendation you make? Finding an answer to these questions is a key challenge in all forms of marketing that rely on and explore social ties; ranging from personal recommendations to viral marketing. In the first part of this paper, we show that there can be no pricing mechanism that is "truthful"…
In peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading, a secured infrastructure is required to manage trade and record monetary transactions. A central server/authority can be used for this. But there is a risk of central authority influencing the energy price. So blockchain technology is being preferred as a secured infrastructure in P2P trading. Blockchain provides a distributed repository along with smart contracts for trade management. This reduces the influence of central authority in trading. However, these blockchain-based systems still rely on a central authority to pair/match sellers with consumers fo…
We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this setting, we consider the following questions: What fraction of the optimum social welfare does a revenue maximizing solution achieve? Are there pricing mechanisms which achieve both good revenue and good welfare simultaneously? To address these questions, we give efficient pricing schemes which are guaranteed to result in both good revenue and welfare, as long as …
Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing and trying out the product. We show that the seller can use a simple mechanism to best take advantage of the buyer's post-purchase learning to maximize his guaranteed-profit. We show that this mechanism combines a generous refund, which performs well when the buyer is relatively informed, with non-refundable random discounts, which work well when the buyer i…
We design a framework for truthful double multi-channel spectrum auctions where each seller (or buyer) can sell (or buy) multiple spectrum channels based on their individual needs. Open, market-based spectrum trading motivates existing spectrum owners (as sellers) to lease their selected idle spectrum channels to new spectrum users (as buyers) who need the spectrum desperately. The most significant requirement is how to make the auction economic-robust (truthful in particular) while enabling spectrum reuse to improve spectrum utilization. Additionally, in practice, both sellers and buyers woul…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study both social welfare and profit maximization with revealed preferences. Although social welfare maximization is a seemingly non-convex optimization problem in prices, we show that (i) it can be reduced to a dual convex optimization problem in prices, and (ii) the revealed preferences can be interpreted as supergradients of the concave conjugate of valuation, wit…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) > v(S) + v(T)$). We show that the mechanism first proposed by Babaioff et al. [2014] - the better of selling the items separately and bundling them together - guarantees a $Θ(d)$ fraction of the optimal revenue, where $d$ is a measure on the degree of complementarity. Note that this is the first approximately optimal mechanism for a buyer wh…
Strategic Bargaining in Multi-Buyer Markets: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards for LLM Negotiations
Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（数据、系统与社会研究所，麻省理工学院）；Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue University（米奇·丹尼尔斯商学院，普渡大学）；The Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology（物理、数学与天文学部，加州理工学院）；Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology（计算与数学科学系，加州理工学院）；H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（H. 米尔顿·斯图尔特工业与系统工程学院，佐治亚理工学院）；Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（土木与环境工程系、运筹学中心，麻省理工学院）
We study the implications of selling through a voice-based virtual assistant (VA). The seller has a set of products available and the VA decides which product to offer and at what price, seeking to maximize its revenue, consumer- or total-surplus. The consumer is impatient and rational, seeking to maximize her expected utility given the information available to her. The VA selects products based on the consumer's request and other information available to it and then presents them sequentially. Once a product is presented and priced, the consumer evaluates it and decides whether to make a purc…
In this paper we revisit the notion of simplicity in mechanisms. We consider a seller of $m$ items, facing a single buyer with valuation $v$. We observe that previous attempts to define complexity measures often fail to classify mechanisms that are intuitively considered simple (e.g., the "selling separately" mechanism) as such. We suggest to view a menu as simple if a bundle that maximizes the buyer's profit can be found by conducting a few primitive operations that are considered simple. The \emph{primitive complexity of a menu} is the number of primitive operations needed to (adaptively) fi…
We develop extensions to auction theory results that are useful in real life scenarios. 1. Since valuations are generally positive we first develop approximations using the log-normal distribution. This would be useful for many finance related auction settings since asset prices are usually non-negative. 2. We formulate a positive symmetric discrete distribution, which is likely to be followed by the total number of auction participants, and incorporate this into auction theory results. 3. We develop extensions when the valuations of the bidders are interdependent and incorporate all the resul…
Cloud computing has been an emerging model which aims at allowing customers to utilize computing resources hosted by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). More and more consumers rely on CSPs to supply computing and storage service on the one hand, and CSPs try to attract consumers on favorable terms on the other. In such competitive cloud computing markets, pricing policies are critical to market efficiency. While CSPs often publish their prices and charge users according to the amount of resources they consume, auction mechanism is rarely applied. In fact a feasible auction mechanism is the most e…
