Unit-Demand Pricing for Min-Buying Customers

Titing Cui, Michael Hamilton, Jourdain Lamperski and Kasra Tari

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study the unit-demand pricing problem under \textit{min-buying} behavior, where customers purchase the lowest-priced item that yields non-negative utility. In contrast to the quasi-linear model, we show that uniform pricing becomes substantially more effective under min-buying. First, we study symmetric environments. We show that for min-buying customers with independent and identically distributed valuations, a uniform price across items is optimal. We then extend this optimality result to all valuations drawn from exchangeable and affiliated distributions. However, uniform pricing is not optimal in all symmetric environments: for min-buying customers we construct an exchangeable and non-affiliated valuation distribution for which the gap between uniform pricing and optimal item pricing is logarithmic in the number of items. This gap is tight and matches the worst-case gap in the quasi-linear setting. Next, we consider asymmetric environments in which valuations are independent but not identically distributed. When these valuations are regular and customers are min-buying, we show that a uniform price guarantees approximately 69.86\% of the optimal item-pricing revenue and this is tight. Overall, our results highlight that the value of non-uniform pricing substantially diminishes, and often disappears entirely, under more conservative demand models in which customers engage in satisficing behaviors such as min-buying.

Date: 2026-10
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