Hartline Gives Keynote & Haghpanah Presents Lecture for Dynamic Pricing Workshop
The workshop brought together researchers from Computer Science, Economics, and Operations Research to discuss methods from their respective fields on the common topic of dynamic pricing.
Prof. Jason Hartline recently delivered a Keynote Lecture at the Dynamic Pricing Workshop, held December 11-15, 2017 in Santiago de Chile, Chile. His talk was titled, "Optimal and Approximately Optimal Pricing” and encompassed selected topics from Chapters 8 and 9 of his textbook manuscript 'Mechanism Design and Approximation'.
Also in attendance, Northwestern PhD Alumnus (currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at Penn State) Prof. Nima Haghpanah presented a lecture at the workshop featuring his recent paper, "Sequential Mechanisms with Ex-Post Participation Guarantees". He works on Microeconomics theory and its connections with Computer Science, in addition to his research interests: Mechanism and Contract design, Auction Design, and Algorithms.
The Dynamic Pricing Workshop is a venue to discuss the latest questions and methods arising in dynamic pricing decisions, both from a theoretical and applied perspective. Central to the workshop is the multidisciplinary nature of the area so that the workshop will bring together top researchers from three related scientific communities: Economists working on issues related to dynamic mechanism design; Computer scientists working on problems related to algorithmic pricing; and researchers from operations research working on revenue management. The workshop will feature three short courses of two hours each by experts in each of the three fields and a number of short talks delivered by the participants. Ample time for informal discussions will be left in order to foster cross-flied collaborations. The program will thus be very flexible and mostly arranged on demand. There will be slots to talk for all participants that want to do so.
Hartline's Talk Synopsis: The text Mechanism Design and Approximation is based on a graduate course that has been developed at Northwestern over the past five years. It presents the classical theory of economic mechanism design and introduces a new theory of approximation for mechanism design.
Haghpanah's Talk Abstract: We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism satisfies a strong individual rationality constraint, requiring that the stage utility of each agent be positive during each period. We show that the optimum mechanism can be computed by solving a nested sequence of static (single-period) mechanisms that optimize a tradeoff between the surplus of the allocation and the buyer's utility. We also provide a simple dynamic mechanism that obtains at least half of the optimal revenue. The mechanism either ignores history and posts the optimal monopoly price in each period, or allocates with a probability that is independent of the current report of the agent and is based only on previous reports. Our characterization extends to multi-agent auctions. We also formulate a discounted infinite horizon version of the problem, where we study the performance of "Markov mechanisms."