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Characterizing the Efficiency of Static Pricing Schemes as a Function of the Supply The problem of selling a supply of k units to a stream of customers constitutes one of the cornerstones in revenue management. Static pricing schemes (that output the same price to all customers) are commonly used because of their simplicity and their many desirable properties; they are anonymous, nonadaptive, and order oblivious. Although the efficiency of those schemes should improve as the supply k increases, prior work has only focused either on algorithms that aim for a constant approximation that is independent of k or on the setting where k becomes really large. In contrast, this paper characterizes the efficiency of static pricing schemes as a function of the supply. Our approach stems from identifying a “sweet spot” between selling enough items and obtaining enough utility from customers with high valuations. Subsequent work shows that our pricing scheme is the optimal static pricing for every value of k. 

We revisit the classic Pandora’s Box (PB) problem under correlated distributions on the box values. Recent work of [Shuchi Chawla et al., 2020] obtained constant approximate algorithms for a restricted class of policies for the problem that visit boxes in a fixed order. In this work, we study the complexity of approximating the optimal policy which may adaptively choose which box to visit next based on the values seen so far. Our main result establishes an approximation-preserving equivalence of PB to the well studied Uniform Decision Tree (UDT) problem from stochastic optimization and a variant of the Min-Sum Set Cover (MSSC_f) problem. For distributions of support m, UDT admits a log m approximation, and while a constant factor approximation in polynomial time is a long-standing open problem, constant factor approximations are achievable in subexponential time [Ray Li et al., 2020]. Our main result implies that the same properties hold for PB and MSSC_f. We also study the case where the distribution over values is given more succinctly as a mixture of m product distributions. This problem is again related to a noisy variant of the Optimal Decision Tree which is significantly more challenging. We give a constant-factor approximation that runs in time n^Õ(m²/ε²) when the mixture components on every box are either identical or separated in TV distance by ε. 

We study the revenue guarantees and approximability of item pricing. Recent work shows that with n heterogeneous items, item-pricing guarantees an O(logn) approximation to the optimal revenue achievable by any (buy-many) mechanism, even when buyers have arbitrarily combinatorial valuations. However, finding good item prices is challenging – it is known that even under unit-demand valuations, it is NP-hard to find item prices that approximate the revenue of the optimal item pricing better than O(√n). Our work provides a more fine-grained analysis of the revenue guarantees and computational complexity in terms of the number of item “categories” which may be significantly fewer than n. We assume the items are partitioned in k categories so that items within a category are totally-ordered and a buyer’s value for a bundle depends only on the best item contained from every category. We show that item-pricing guarantees an O(logk) approximation to the optimal (buy-many) revenue and provide a PTAS for computing the optimal item-pricing when k is constant. We also provide a matching lower bound showing that the problem is (strongly) NP-hard even when k=1. Our results naturally extend to the case where items are only partially ordered, in which case the revenue guarantees and computational complexity depend on the width of the partial ordering, i.e. the largest set for which no two items are comparable. 

We design fair-sponsored search auctions that achieve a near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality. Our work builds upon the model and auction design of Chawla and Jagadeesan, who considered the special case of a single slot. We consider sponsored search settings with multiple slots and the standard model of click-through rates that are multiplicatively separable into an advertiser-specific component and a slot-specific component. When similar users have similar advertiser-specific click-through rates, our auctions achieve the same near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality. When similar users can have different advertiser-specific preferences, we show that a preference-based fairness guarantee holds. Finally, we provide a computationally efficient algorithm for computing payments for our auctions as well as those in previous work, resolving another open direction from Chawla and Jagadeesan. 

We design fair-sponsored search auctions that achieve a near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality. Our work builds upon the model and auction design of Chawla and Jagadeesan, who considered the special case of a single slot. We consider sponsored search settings with multiple slots and the standard model of click-through rates that are multiplicatively separable into an advertiser-specific component and a slot-specific component. When similar users have similar advertiser-specific click-through rates, our auctions achieve the same near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality. When similar users can have different advertiser-specific preferences, we show that a preference-based fairness guarantee holds. Finally, we provide a computationally efficient algorithm for computing payments for our auctions as well as those in previous work, resolving another open direction from Chawla and Jagadeesan.