[Intelligence Seminar] April 23, 3:30pm: , Presentation by Sasa Pekec

Dana Houston dhouston at cs.cmu.edu
Mon Apr 22 13:15:33 EDT 2013



> INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
> APRIL 23 AT 3:30PM, IN GHC 4405
>
> SPEAKER: SASA PEKEC (Duke University)
> Host: Tuomas Sandholm
> For meetings, contact Charlotte Yano (yano at cs.cmu.edu 
> <mailto:yano at cs.cmu.edu>)
>
> OPTIMAL PRICING MECHANISMS WHEN EXCLUSIVITY IS VALUABLE
>
> Multiple identical items are being sold to unit-demand buyers in a
> network. Buyers are willing to pay a premium if they obtain the item
> exclusively in their neighborhood, i.e., if no neighbor obtains the
> item. Each buyer has a private value for the item, as well as a
> private value for obtaining the item exclusively among neighbors. The
> seller limited to offering posted prices should inflate the price in
> order to maximize revenues and capture the value buyers put on the
> allocative externalities. However, we show that these posted price
> mechanisms are suboptimal by solving the revenue maximizing mechanism
> design problem for several special information structures. We show
> that this mechanism design problem could be computationally hard even
> when the corresponding perfect information problem is trivial to
> solve. Furthermore, optimal seller revenues are non-monotonic in
> buyers' valuations because information rents that buyers capture
> depend not just on the private values, but also on the underlying
> network topology. Finally, we present an ascending auction
> implementation of the optimal mechanism on the complete graph with
> private values that admit a generic one-dimensional representation.
> Our results provide insights on when and where exclusive allocations
> should be considered, and how to price exclusivity.
>
> BIO
>
> Sasa Pekec is an Associate Professor in the Decision Sciences Area at
> the Fuqua School of Business. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics
> from Rutgers University. He joined Duke in 1998 and is currently
> teaching the core statistics course in the daytime MBA and the Cross
> Continent MBA programs. Professor Pekec research is interdisciplinary
> and revolves around decision-making in complex competitive
> environments, and includes work on multiple object auction design,
> subset choice and bundle valuations, preference elicitation, and
> information aggregation. He has published articles in Management
> Science and Operations Research, as well as in top academic journals
> in other fields such as economics, mathematics, and psychology.
> His work on combinatorial auctions had been widely cited and had
> influenced design of a new generation of now standard procurement
> auction procedures in a variety of industries. Professor Pekec's
> consulting experience includes banking, internet, pharmaceutical,
> retail, and telecommunications industries. He serves on the
> Supervisory Board of Atlantic Grupa, one of the leading FMCG companies
> in SE Europe. Professor Pekec is a member of the Council of Economic
> Advisors to the President of Croatia.
> -- 

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