Replicable Online pricing
Kiarash Banihashem, Samira Goudarzi, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Mohammadhossein Bateni, Hossein Esfandiari
We explore the concept of replicability, which ensures algorithmic consistency despite input data variations, for online pricing problems, specifically prophet inequalities and delegation. Given the crucial role of replicability in enhancing transparency in economic decision-making, we present a replicable and nearly optimal pricing strategy for prophet inequalities, achieving a sample complexity of $\text{poly}(\log^*|\mathcal{X}|)$, where $\mathcal{X}$ is the ground set of distributions. Furthermore, we extend these findings to the delegation problem and establish a matching lower bound, proving the necessity of the $\log^*|\mathcal{X}|$ dependence. En route to obtaining these results, we develop a number of technical contributions which are of independent interest. Most notably, we propose a new algorithm for a variant of the heavy hitter problem, which has a nearly linear dependence on the inverse of the heavy hitter parameter, significantly improving upon existing results which have a cubic dependence.