2009/01/11 by Sourav Chakraborty, Chakraborty, Sourav, Nikhil R. Devanur +1
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computational Complexity (cs.CC) #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #Discrete Mathematics (cs.DM) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Optimization and Search Problems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0901.1427
openalex publication_date 2009/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the bid-profile tends to ``smoothen''. This algorithm is used as a subroutine in designing truthful auctions for the same setting: the allocation has to be done online, while the payments can be decided at the end of the day. Earlier, a reduction from the auction design problem to the allocation problem was known only for the unit-demand case. We give a reduction for the general case when the bidders have decreasing marginal utilities. The problem is inspired by sponsored search auctions.