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CMU-CS-05-176
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
CMU-CS-05-176
Approximation Algorithms for Item Pricing
Maria-Florina Balcan, Avrim Blum
July 2005
Superceded by Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-05-176R.
CMU-CS-05-176.ps
CMU-CS-05-176.pdf
Keywords: Approximate algorithms, online optimization, profit
maximization, combinatorial auctions, single minded, unlimited supply
We present approximation algorithms and online algorithms
for a number of problems of
pricing items for sale so as to maximize seller's revenue in an
unlimited supply setting. Our main result is an
O(k)-approximation algorithm for pricing items to single-minded bidders
who each want at most k items. This improves over recent
independent work of Briest and Krysta who achieve an O2)
bound.
For the case k = 2, where
we get a 4-approximation,
this can be viewed as the following graph
vertex pricing problem: given a (multi)graph G with valuations
ve on the edges, find prices pi for
the vertices to maximize
∑{e=(i,j):ve≥pi+pj}
pi + pj.
We also improve the approximation of Guruswami et. al. from O(log m+ log n) to O(log n), where m is the number
of bidders and n is the number of items, for the
"highway problem" in which all desired subsets are intervals
on a line.
9 pages
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