{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,27]],"date-time":"2025-11-27T16:14:40Z","timestamp":1764260080311,"version":"3.41.0"},"reference-count":26,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,31]],"date-time":"2019-05-31T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1559260800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"NSF","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CCF-1813188"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CCF-1813188"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"Stanford Graduate Fellowship"},{"name":"European Research Council","award":["639945 (ACCORD)"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["639945 (ACCORD)"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Econ. Comput."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>The problem of pricing the cloud has attracted much recent attention due to the widespread use of cloud computing and cloud services. From a theoretical perspective, several mechanisms that provide strong efficiency or fairness guarantees and desirable incentive properties have been designed. However, these mechanisms often rely on a rigid model, with several parameters needing to be precisely known for the guarantees to hold. In this article, we consider a stochastic model and show that it is possible to obtain good welfare and revenue guarantees with simple mechanisms that do not make use of the information on some of these parameters. In particular, we prove that a mechanism that sets the same price per timestep for jobs of any length achieves at least 50% of the welfare and revenue obtained by a mechanism that can set different prices for jobs of different lengths, and the ratio can be improved if we have more specific knowledge of some parameters. Similarly, a mechanism that sets the same price for all servers even though the servers may receive different kinds of jobs can provide a reasonable welfare and revenue approximation compared to a mechanism that is allowed to set different prices for different servers.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3327973","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,6,11]],"date-time":"2019-06-11T13:28:16Z","timestamp":1560259696000},"page":"1-27","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["Simple Pricing Schemes for the Cloud"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"7","author":[{"given":"Ian A.","family":"Kash","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA"}]},{"given":"Peter","family":"Key","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Cambridge, Cambridge, UK"}]},{"given":"Warut","family":"Suksompong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Oxford, Oxford, UK"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,6,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFCOMW.2012.6193479"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","unstructured":"Amazon. 2017. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/ec2\/spot\/pricing.  Amazon. 2017. Amazon EC2 Spot Instances Pricing. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/aws.amazon.com\/ec2\/spot\/pricing."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2764468.2764535"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","unstructured":"Azure. 2016. Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/pricing\/calculator.  Azure. 2016. Microsoft Azure Pricing Calculator. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/pricing\/calculator."},{"volume-title":"Proceedings of the 1st Innovations in Computer Science Conference. 166--178","year":"2011","author":"Babaioff Moshe","key":"e_1_2_1_5_1"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1386790.1386801"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1806689.1806733"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/2722129.2722136"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2940716.2940730"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","unstructured":"Louis Columbus. 2016. Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Estimates 2016. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/louiscolumbus\/2016\/03\/13\/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016.  Louis Columbus. 2016. Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts and Market Estimates 2016. Retrieved May 1 2019 from http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/louiscolumbus\/2016\/03\/13\/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","unstructured":"Sina Dehghani Ian A. Kash and Peter Key. 2016. Online Stochastic Scheduling and Pricing the Cloud. Working Paper.  Sina Dehghani Ian A. Kash and Peter Key. 2016. Online Stochastic Scheduling and Pricing the Cloud. Working Paper."},{"volume-title":"Proceedings of the Workshop on Economics of Cloud Computing.","year":"2016","author":"Dierks Ludwig","key":"e_1_2_1_12_1"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","unstructured":"Yann Disser John Fearnley Martin Gairing Oliver G\u00f6bel Max Klimm Daniel Schmand Alexander Skopalik etal 2016. Hiring secretaries over time: The benefit of concurrent employment. arXiv:1604.08125.  Yann Disser John Fearnley Martin Gairing Oliver G\u00f6bel Max Klimm Daniel Schmand Alexander Skopalik et al. 2016. Hiring secretaries over time: The benefit of concurrent employment. arXiv:1604.08125."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/FOCS.2017.56"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","unstructured":"Paul D\u00fctting Felix Fischer and Max Klimm. 2018. Revenue gaps for static and dynamic posted pricing of homogeneous goods. arXiv:1607.07105.  Paul D\u00fctting Felix Fischer and Max Klimm. 2018. Revenue gaps for static and dynamic posted pricing of homogeneous goods. arXiv:1607.07105."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-030-04612-5_10"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/2722129.2722139"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2600057.2602889"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_19_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-319-18356-5_10"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-662-54110-4_6"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_21_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/2050805.2050827"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_22_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2312005.2312051"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_23_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/MIC.2016.4"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_24_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2486159.2486187"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_25_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/2832249.2832280"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_26_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/INFCOM.2013.6566946"}],"container-title":["ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3327973","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3327973","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"syndication"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3327973","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,18]],"date-time":"2025-06-18T00:25:33Z","timestamp":1750206333000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3327973"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,31]]},"references-count":26,"journal-issue":{"issue":"2","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,31]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3327973"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3327973","relation":{},"ISSN":["2167-8375","2167-8383"],"issn-type":[{"type":"print","value":"2167-8375"},{"type":"electronic","value":"2167-8383"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2019,5,31]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2018-01-01","order":0,"name":"received","label":"Received","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2019-04-01","order":1,"name":"accepted","label":"Accepted","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2019-06-10","order":2,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}