2023/03/28 by Zhengyang Liu, Zeyu Ren, Liu, Zhengyang +3 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Voting Systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.15711
openalex publication_date 2023/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer distribution is known, we prove that there exists a distribution over different fixed-price mechanisms, such that the approximation ratio lies within the interval of [0.71, 0.7381]. Furthermore, we show that the same approximation ratio holds for the optimal fixed-price mechanism, when both buyer and seller distributions are known. As a result, the previously best-known (1 - 1/e+0.0001)-approximation can be improved to 0.71. Additionally, we examine randomized fixed-price mechanisms when we receive just one single sample from the seller distribution, for both symmetric and asymmetric settings. Our findings reveal that posting the single sample as the price remains optimal among all randomized fixed-price mechanisms.