论文标题
在发布的价格拍卖中发出信号
Signaling in Posted Price Auctions
论文作者
论文摘要
我们研究了单项单一单元贝叶斯发布的价格拍卖,购买者依次到达,他们对所出售商品的估值取决于随机的,未知的自然状态。卖方完全了解实际状态,并可以向买家发送信号,以披露有关它的信息。例如,自然的状态可能反映了该项目的状况和/或某些特定特征,仅卖方知道这些特征。卖方面临的问题是关于如何部分披露有关国家的信息,以最大程度地提高收入。与经典的信号问题不同,在这种情况下,卖方还必须将发送给买家的信号与他们的一些价格建议相关联。与标准设置相比,这引入了其他挑战。我们考虑两种情况:卖方只能向所有买家发送信号,而卖方可以私下向每个买家发送不同的信号的情况。作为第一步,我们证明,在这两种情况下,除非p = np,否则最大化卖方收入的问题即使对于单个买家的基本实例,除非P = NP。结果,在本文的其余部分中,我们专注于设计PTAS。为此,我们首先引入了一个统一的框架,其中包括公共信号和私人信号,其核心结果是分解引理,允许专注于有限的一组可能的买家的后代。这构成了开发我们的PTAS的基础。特别是,在公共信号设置中,我们的PTA基于线性编程采用了一些临时技术,而我们的私有设置的PTA依赖于椭球方法来在多项式时间内解决指数尺寸的LP。在后一种情况下,我们需要一个自定义的近似分离甲骨文,我们使用动态编程方法来实现。
We study single-item single-unit Bayesian posted price auctions, where buyers arrive sequentially and their valuations for the item being sold depend on a random, unknown state of nature. The seller has complete knowledge of the actual state and can send signals to the buyers so as to disclose information about it. For instance, the state of nature may reflect the condition and/or some particular features of the item, which are known to the seller only. The problem faced by the seller is about how to partially disclose information about the state so as to maximize revenue. Unlike classical signaling problems, in this setting, the seller must also correlate the signals being sent to the buyers with some price proposals for them. This introduces additional challenges compared to standard settings. We consider two cases: the one where the seller can only send signals publicly visible to all buyers, and the case in which the seller can privately send a different signal to each buyer. As a first step, we prove that, in both settings, the problem of maximizing the seller's revenue does not admit an FPTAS unless P=NP, even for basic instances with a single buyer. As a result, in the rest of the paper, we focus on designing PTASs. In order to do so, we first introduce a unifying framework encompassing both public and private signaling, whose core result is a decomposition lemma that allows focusing on a finite set of possible buyers' posteriors. This forms the basis on which our PTASs are developed. In particular, in the public signaling setting, our PTAS employs some ad hoc techniques based on linear programming, while our PTAS for the private setting relies on the ellipsoid method to solve an exponentially-sized LP in polynomial time. In the latter case, we need a custom approximate separation oracle, which we implement with a dynamic programming approach.