Asymptotically Optimal Welfare of Posted Pricing for Multiple Items with MHR Distributions

Abstract

We consider the problem of posting prices for unit-demand buyers if all $n$ buyers have identically distributed valuations drawn from a distribution with monotone hazard rate. We show that even with multiple items asymptotically optimal welfare can be guaranteed. Our main results apply to the case that either a buyer's value for different items are independent or that they are perfectly correlated. We give mechanisms using dynamic prices that obtain a $1-\Theta \left(\frac{1}{\log n}\right)$-fraction of the optimal social welfare in expectation. Furthermore, we devise mechanisms that only use static item prices and are $1-\Theta \left(\frac{\log \log \log n}{\log n}\right)$-competitive compared to the optimal social welfare. As we show, both guarantees are asymptotically optimal, even for a single item and exponential distributions.

To appear at the 29th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2021)