Prices, Auctions, and Combinatorial Prophet Inequalities - Brendan Lucier

From Katie Gentilello October 13th, 2016

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The most common way to sell resources, from apples to business licenses to concert tickets, is to post prices. A choice of prices can be viewed as an algorithm for an online stochastic optimization problem, which makes decisions using value thresholds. This connection provides an opportunity to use the famous prophet inequality -- which describes the power of threshold rules -- to study pricing problems, and vice-versa. In this talk I'll present a general framework for deriving new prophet inequalities using economic insights from pricing, with algorithmic applications. Along the way, I'll describe an unexpected connection between posted prices and equilibria of non-truthful auctions.

Based on joint works with Paul Duetting, Michal Feldman, Nick Gravin, and Thomas Kesselheim.

https://mediaspace.gatech.edu/media/lucier/1_0gki7lw1

Tags: arc colloquiumalgorithms and randomness centergeorgia techfall 2016recorded by gtlibrary

name: Brendan Lucier
Date: October 3rd, 2016
Appears In: Open Scholarship

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Prices, Auctions, and Combinatorial Prophet Inequalities - Brendan Lucier

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