We consider a monopolist seller with n heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The seller aims to maximize his revenue. We suggest using the a priori better of two simple pricing methods: selling the items separately , each at its optimal price, and bundling together , in which the entire set of items is sold as one bundle at its optimal price. We show that for any distribution, this mechanism achieves a constant-factor approximation to the optimal revenue. Beyond its simplicity, this is the first computationally tractable mechanism to obtain a constant-factor approximation for this multi-parameter problem. We additionally discuss extensions to multiple buyers and to valuations that are correlated across items.

中文翻译：

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添加剂购买者的简单且近似最优的机制

我们考虑一个垄断卖家n异类物品，面向单一买家。买方根据（不同的）分布独立绘制的每个项目都有一个价值，她对一组项目的价值是相加的。卖方的目标是最大化他的收入。我们建议使用先验更好两种简单的定价方法：单独出售物品，每个都以其最优价格，并且捆绑在一起，其中整组商品以最优价格作为一个捆绑销售。我们表明，对于任何分布，这种机制都能实现对最优收入的常数因子近似。除了简单之外，这是第一个为这个多参数问题获得恒定因子近似的计算上易于处理的机制。我们还讨论了对多个买家的扩展以及跨项目相关的估值。