Member Seminar

Speaker: Tomer Ezra

Title: The Competition Complexity of Dynamic Pricing

Abstract: One of the most fundamental questions in mechanism design is the tradeoff between simplicity and optimality. A canonical example of this tradeoff is competition complexity in auctions, which quantifies how many additional bidders are needed for a simple mechanism to (approximately) match the revenue of the optimal mechanism.

In this talk, we analyze the competition complexity of dynamic pricing in the setting of selling a single item. We establish tight asymptotic guarantees for various scenarios, including when bidder values are i.i.d., independent, or correlated. Our results characterize the performance of different classes of dynamic pricing algorithms and provide insights into their effectiveness under varying market conditions.