Efficient and truthful mechanisms to price time on remote servers/machines have been the subject of much work in recent years due to the importance of the cloud market. This paper considers online revenue maximization for a unit capacity server, when jobs are non preemptive, in the Bayesian setting: at each time step, one job arrives, with parameters drawn from an underlying distribution.We design an efficiently computable truthful posted price mechanism, which maximizes revenue in expectation and in retrospect, up to additive error. The prices are posted prior to learning the agent's type, and the computed pricing scheme is deterministic.We also show the pricing mechanism is robust to learning the job distribution from samples, where polynomially many samples suffice to obtain near optimal prices.
Online revenue maximization for server pricing
Abstract Efficient and truthful mechanisms to price resources on servers/machines have been the subject of much work in recent years due to the importance of the cloud market. This paper considers revenue maximization in the online stochastic setting with non-preemptive jobs and a unit capacity server. One agent/job arrives at every time step, with parameters drawn from the underlying distribution. We design a posted-price mechanism which can be efficiently computed and is revenue-optimal in expectation and in retrospect, up to additive error. The prices are posted prior to learning the agent’s type, and the computed pricing scheme is deterministic, depending only on the length of the allotted time interval and on the earliest time the server is available. We also prove that the proposed pricing strategy is robust to imprecise knowledge of the job distribution and that a distribution learned from polynomially many samples is sufficient to obtain a near-optimal truthful pricing strategy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1750436
- PAR ID:
- 10318799
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1387-2532
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-022-09544-y
