We consider the online auction<\/i> problem proposed by Bar-Yossef, Hildrum, and Wu [4] in which an auctioneer is selling identical items to bidders arriving one at a time. We give an auction that achieves a constant factor of the optimal profit less an O<\/i>(h<\/i>) additive loss term, where h<\/i> is the value of the highest bid. Furthermore, this auction does not require foreknowledge of the range of bidders’ valuations. On both counts, this answers open questions from [4, 5]. We further improve on the results from [5] for the online posted-price<\/i> problem by reducing their additive loss term from O<\/i>(h<\/i> log h<\/i> log log h<\/i>) to O<\/i>(h<\/i> log log h<\/i>). Finally, we define the notion of an (offline) attribute auction<\/i> for modeling the problem of auctioning items to consumers who are not a-priori indistinguishable. We apply our online auction solution to achieve good bounds for the attribute auction problem with 1-dimensional attributes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We consider the online auction problem proposed by Bar-Yossef, Hildrum, and Wu [4] in which an auctioneer is selling identical items to bidders arriving one at a time. We give an auction that achieves a constant factor of the optimal profit less an O(h) additive loss term, where h is the value of the highest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13554],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-146920","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"ACM\/SIAM","msr_edition":"ACM\/SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2005-01-01","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"1156-1163","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"http:\/\/doi.acm.org\/10.1145\/1070597","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"url","title":"http:\/\/doi.acm.org\/10.1145\/1070597","viewUrl":false,"id":false,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":0,"url":"http:\/\/doi.acm.org\/10.1145\/1070597"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Avrim Blum","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Jason D. 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