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Econ. Comput."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,30]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed with posted prices under a range of assumptions about the designer\u2019s information and agents\u2019 valuations. Our results provide insights about the relative power of uniform and non-uniform prices, the relative difficulty of different valuation classes, and the implications of different informational assumptions. Among other results, we prove constant-factor guarantees for agents with subadditive valuations over identical items, even in an incomplete-information setting and with uniform prices. We also show that no constant-factor guarantee is possible for general valuations over identical items, even in a full-information setting and with non-uniform prices.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3373715","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2020,4,3]],"date-time":"2020-04-03T16:15:03Z","timestamp":1585930503000},"page":"1-29","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Pricing Multi-Unit Markets"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"7","author":[{"given":"Tomer","family":"Ezra","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Michal","family":"Feldman","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Tim","family":"Roughgarden","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Columbia University, New York, NY, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Warut","family":"Suksompong","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Oxford, UK"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2020,1,30]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1257\/0002828043052330"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 1st Innovations in Computer Science. 166--178","author":"Babaioff Moshe","year":"2011","unstructured":"Moshe Babaioff , Liad Blumrosen , Shaddin Dughmi , and Yaron Singer . 2011 . Posting prices with unknown distributions . In Proceedings of the 1st Innovations in Computer Science. 166--178 . Moshe Babaioff, Liad Blumrosen, Shaddin Dughmi, and Yaron Singer. 2011. Posting prices with unknown distributions. In Proceedings of the 1st Innovations in Computer Science. 166--178."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2559152"},{"volume-title":"Proceedings of the 55th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. 21--30","author":"Babaioff Moshe","key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","unstructured":"Moshe Babaioff , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , and S. Matthew Weinberg . 2014. A simple and approximately optimal mechanism for an additive buyer . In Proceedings of the 55th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. 21--30 . Moshe Babaioff, Nicole Immorlica, Brendan Lucier, and S. Matthew Weinberg. 2014. A simple and approximately optimal mechanism for an additive buyer. 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