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arXiv 1410.7263cs.GTcs.DMcs.SI
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具有负外部性的社交网络定价

Pricing in Social Networks with Negative Externalities

Zhigang Cao, Xujin Chen, Xiaodong Hu, Changjun Wang

摘要:

我们研究的问题,定价一个不可分割的产品,消费者谁是嵌入在一个给定的社会网络。我们的目标是最大限度地提高卖家的收入。我们假设,一旦卖家发布的价格不超过他们对产品的价值,消费者就会购买产品。产品对消费者的价值由两个因素决定:消费者指定的固定内在价值和消费者邻居以线性方式施加的可变外部性。我们研究的情况下,负外部性,它捕捉了许多有趣的情况下,但少得多的理解相比,其正外部性对应。我们假设关于网络、消费者内在价值和负外部性的完整信息。最大收益通常是通过迭代定价来实现的,迭代定价为不耐烦的消费者提供了一个随时间变化的价格序列。我们证明了即使对于具有一致内在值的未加权树网络,找到最优迭代定价也是NP困难的。作为对硬度结果的补充,我们设计了一个2-近似算法来求解具有(可能)非一致内在值的一般加权网络的迭代定价。我们表明,作为一个近似的最优迭代定价,单一的定价可以很好地为许多有趣的情况下,但理论上它可以表现得任意坏。

英文摘要:

We study the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller posts a price not greater than their values of the product. The product's value for a consumer is determined by two factors: a fixed consumer-specified intrinsic value and a variable externality that is exerted from the consumer's neighbors in a linear way. We study the scenario of negative externalities, which captures many interesting situations, but is much less understood in comparison with its positive externality counterpart. We assume complete information about the network, consumers' intrinsic values, and the negative externalities. The maximum revenue is in general achieved by iterative pricing, which offers impatient consumers a sequence of prices over time. We prove that it is NP-hard to find an optimal iterative pricing, even for unweighted tree networks with uniform intrinsic values. Complementary to the hardness result, we design a 2-approximation algorithm for finding iterative pricing in general weighted networks with (possibly) nonuniform intrinsic values. We show that, as an approximation to optimal iterative pricing, single pricing can work rather well for many interesting cases, but theoretically it can behave arbitrarily bad.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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