Abstract

Abstract We consider the online auction problem proposed byBar-Yossef, Hildrum, and Wu [4] in which an auctioneer is selling identical items to bidders arriving one at atime. 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 bid. Furthermore,this auction does not require foreknowledge of the range of bidders ' valuations. On both counts, this answersopen questions from [4, 5]. We further improve on the results from [5] for the online posted-price problem by re-ducing their additive loss term from O(h log h log log h)to O(h log log h). Finally, we define the notion of an(offline) attribute auction for modeling the problem of auctioning items to consumers who are not a-priori in-distinguishable. We apply our online auction solution to achieve good bounds for the attribute auction problemwith 1-dimensional attributes.

Citations