Approximation Schemes for a Buyer with Independent Items via Symmetries. (arXiv:1905.05231v1 [cs.GT])

We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $n$ items facing a single buyer. We introduce the notion of $symmetric~menu~complexity$ of a mechanism, which counts the number of distinct options the buyer may purchase, up to permutations of the items. Our main result is that a mechanism of quasi-polynomial symmetric menu complexity suffices to guarantee a $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation when the buyer is unit-demand over independent items, even when the value distribution is unbounded, and that this mechanism can be found in quasi-polynomial time.

Our key technical result is a poly-time, (symmetric) menu-complexity-preserving black-box reduction from achieving a $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation for unbounded valuations that are subadditive over independent items to achieving a $(1-O(\varepsilon))$-approximation when the values are bounded (and still subadditive over independent items). We further apply this reduction to deduce approximation schemes for a suite of valuation classes beyond our main result.

Finally, we show that selling separately (which has exponential menu complexity) can be approximated up to a $(1-\varepsilon)$ factor with a menu of $efficient$-$linear$ $(f(\varepsilon) \cdot n)$ symmetric menu complexity.

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