Posted Pricing and Competition in Large Markets
Jos\'e Correa, Vasilis Livanos, Dana Pizarro, Victor Verdugo

TL;DR
This paper analyzes posted pricing mechanisms in large online markets, demonstrating improved performance guarantees, the impact of multiple units, and the robustness of fixed prices through theoretical results and real-world data.
Contribution
It provides new performance guarantees for fixed prices in large markets, analyzes multi-unit sales, and shows posted prices' robustness, breaking previous worst-case limitations.
Findings
Fixed prices achieve a guarantee of 0.712 in large markets.
The guarantee approaches 1-1/√(2kπ) for selling k units.
Competition complexity remains constant under large market assumptions.
Abstract
Posted price mechanisms are prevalent in allocating goods within online marketplaces due to their simplicity and practical efficiency. We explore a fundamental scenario where buyers' valuations are independent and identically distributed, focusing specifically on the allocation of a single unit. Inspired by the rapid growth and scalability of modern online marketplaces, we investigate optimal performance guarantees under the assumption of a significantly large market. We show a large market benefit when using fixed prices, improving the known guarantee of to . We then study the case of selling identical units, and we prove that the optimal fixed price guarantee approaches , which implies that the large market advantage vanishes as grows. We use real-world auction data to test our fixed price policies in the large market regime.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
