Pricing Decentralization in Customized Pricing Systems and Network Models

摘要: In this thesis, we study the implications of multi-party pricing for both consumers and producers in different settings. Within most organizations, the final price of a product or service is usually the result of a chain of pricing decisions. This chain may consist of different departments of the same company as well as different companies in a specific industry. Understanding the implications of such chains on the final prices and on consumer and producer surplus is the key topic of this dissertation. In the first part of this thesis, we consider a network in which products consist of combinations of perishable resources. In this model, different revenue-maximizing "controllers" determine the resource prices and the price of the product is the sum of the prices of the constituent resources. For uncapacitated networks, we develop bounds on the "price of anarchy"--The loss from totally decentralized control versus centralized control- as the number of controllers increases. We present provably convergent algorithms for calculating Nash equilibrium prices for both the uncapacitated and capacitated cases and -using these algorithms- illustrate counterintuitive situations in which consumer surplus increases after decentralization.