Monotonic Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods

Ran Ben-Moshe; Sergiu Hart; Noam Nisan

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arXiv · 2210.17150

Monotonic Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods

Ran Ben-Moshe·Sergiu Hart·Noam Nisan

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Abstract

Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$ mechanisms may not just lower the revenue, but may in fact yield only a $negligible$ $fraction$ of the maximal revenue; more precisely, the revenue from monotonic mechanisms is no more than k times the simple revenue obtainable by selling the goods separately, or bundled (where k is the number of goods), whereas the maximal revenue may be arbitrarily larger. We then study the class of monotonic mechanisms and its subclass of allocation-monotonic mechanisms, and obtain useful characterizations and revenue bounds.

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BibTeX RIS

Ran Ben-Moshe, Sergiu Hart, Noam Nisan. 2022-10-31. Monotonic Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.17150

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