@booklet {3135408, title = {Monotonic Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods}, howpublished = {Discussion Papers}, year = {2022}, abstract = {

Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of nonmonotonic mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to monotonic mechanisms may not just lower the revenue, but may in fact yield only a negligible fraction of the maximal revenue; more precisely, the revenue from monotonic mechanisms is no more than k times the simple revenue obtainable by selling the goods separately, or bundled (where k is the number of goods), whereas the maximal revenue may be arbitrarily larger. We then study the class of monotonic mechanisms and its subclass of allocation-monotonic mechanisms, and obtain useful characterizations and revenue bounds.

}, url = {http://www.ma.huji.ac.il/hart/abs/mech-monot.html}, author = {Ran Ben Moshe and Sergiu Hart and Noam Nisan} }