Internet and Network Economics
Volume 4286 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 198-213
Assignment Problems in Rental Markets
- David AbrahamAffiliated withDepartment of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
- , Ning ChenAffiliated withDepartment of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
- , Vijay KumarAffiliated withStrategic Planning and Optimization Team
- , Vahab S. MirrokniAffiliated withMicrosoft Research
Abstract
Motivated by the dynamics of the ever-popular online movie rental business, we study a range of assignment problems in rental markets. The assignment problems associated with rental markets possess a rich mathematical structure and are closely related to many well-studied one-sided matching problems. We formalize and characterize the assignment problems in rental markets in terms of one-sided matching problems, and consider several solution concepts for these problems. In order to evaluate and compare these solution concepts (and the corresponding algorithms), we define some “value” functions to capture our objectives, which include fairness, efficiency and social welfare. Then, we bound the value of the output of these algorithms in terms of the chosen value functions.
We also consider models of rental markets corresponding to static, online, and dynamic customer valuations. We provide several constant-factor approximation algorithms for the assignment problem, as well as hardness of approximation results for the different models. Finally, we describe some experiments with a discrete event simulator compare the various algorithms in a practical setting, and present some interesting experimental results.
- Title
- Assignment Problems in Rental Markets
- Book Title
- Internet and Network Economics
- Book Subtitle
- Second International Workshop, WINE 2006, Patras, Greece, December 15-17, 2006. Proceedings
- Pages
- pp 198-213
- Copyright
- 2006
- DOI
- 10.1007/11944874_19
- Print ISBN
- 978-3-540-68138-0
- Online ISBN
- 978-3-540-68141-0
- Series Title
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science
- Series Volume
- 4286
- Series ISSN
- 0302-9743
- Publisher
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Copyright Holder
- Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Industry Sectors
- eBook Packages
- Editors
-
- Paul Spirakis (16)
- Marios Mavronicolas (17)
- Spyros Kontogiannis (18)
- Editor Affiliations
-
- 16. Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras
- 17. Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus
- 18. R.A. Computer Technology Institute
- Authors
-
- David Abraham (19)
- Ning Chen (20)
- Vijay Kumar (21)
- Vahab S. Mirrokni (22)
- Author Affiliations
-
- 19. Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University,
- 20. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington,
- 21. Strategic Planning and Optimization Team,
- 22. Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
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