The Root of Revenue Continuity

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hart, Sergiu, Nisan, Noam
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Hart, Sergiu
Nisan, Noam
author_facet Hart, Sergiu
Nisan, Noam
contents In the setup of selling one or more goods, various papers have shown, in various forms and for various purposes, that a small change in the distribution of a buyer's valuations may cause only a small change in the possible revenue that can be extracted. We prove a simple, clean, convenient, and general statement to this effect: let $X$ and $Y$ be random valuations on $k$ additive goods, and let $W(X,Y)$ be the Wasserstein (or "earth mover's") distance between them; then $$\left\vert \sqrt{Rev(X)}-\sqrt{Rev(Y)}\right\vert \le \sqrt{W(X,Y)}.$$ This further implies that a simple explicit modification of any optimal mechanism for $X$, namely, "uniform discounting," is guaranteed to be almost optimal for any $Y$ that is close to $X$ in the Wasserstein distance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_15735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Root of Revenue Continuity
Hart, Sergiu
Nisan, Noam
Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
In the setup of selling one or more goods, various papers have shown, in various forms and for various purposes, that a small change in the distribution of a buyer's valuations may cause only a small change in the possible revenue that can be extracted. We prove a simple, clean, convenient, and general statement to this effect: let $X$ and $Y$ be random valuations on $k$ additive goods, and let $W(X,Y)$ be the Wasserstein (or "earth mover's") distance between them; then $$\left\vert \sqrt{Rev(X)}-\sqrt{Rev(Y)}\right\vert \le \sqrt{W(X,Y)}.$$ This further implies that a simple explicit modification of any optimal mechanism for $X$, namely, "uniform discounting," is guaranteed to be almost optimal for any $Y$ that is close to $X$ in the Wasserstein distance.
title The Root of Revenue Continuity
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15735