When a store sells items to customers, the store wishes to decide the prices of the items to maximize its profit. If the store sells the items with low (resp. high) prices, the customers buy more (resp. less) items, which provides less profit to the store. It would be hard for the store to decide the prices of items. Assume that a store has a set V of n items and there is a set C of m customers who wish to buy those items. The goal of the store is to decide the price of each item to maximize its profit. We refer to this maximization problem as an item pricing problem. We classify the item pricing problems according to how many items the store can sell or how the customers valuate the items. If the store can sell every item i with unlimited (resp. limited) amount, we refer to this as unlimited supply (resp. limited supply). We say that the item pricing problem is single-minded if each customer j ∈ C wishes to buy a set ej ⊆ V of items and assigns valuation w(ej) ≥ 0. For the single-minded item pricing problems (in unlimited supply), Balcan and Blum regarded them as weighted k-hypergraphs and gave several approximation algorithms. In this paper, we focus on the (pseudo) degree of k-hypergraphs and the valuation ratio, i.e., the ratio between the smallest and the largest valuations. Then for the single-minded item pricing problems (in unlimited supply), we show improved approximation algorithms (for k-hypergraphs, general graphs, bipartite graphs, etc.) with respect to the maximum (pseudo) degree and the valuation ratio.

When a store sells items to customers, the store wishes to decide the prices of items to maximize its profit. Intuitively, if the store sells the items with low (resp. high) prices, the customers buy more (resp. less) items, which provides less profit to the store. So it would be hard for the store to decide the prices of items. Assume that the store has a set V of n items and there is a set E of m customers who wish to buy the items, and also assume that each item i ∈ V has the production cost di and each customer ej ∈ E has the valuation vj on the bundle ej ⊆ V of items. When the store sells an item i ∈ V at the price ri, the profit for the item i is pi=ri-di. The goal of the store is to decide the price of each item to maximize its total profit. We refer to this maximization problem as the item pricing problem. In most of the previous works, the item pricing problem was considered under the assumption that pi ≥ 0 for each i ∈ V, however, Balcan, et al. [In Proc. of WINE, LNCS 4858, 2007] introduced the notion of "loss-leader," and showed that the seller can get more total profit in the case that pi < 0 is allowed than in the case that pi < 0 is not allowed. In this paper, we consider the line highway problem (in which each customer is interested in an interval on the line of the items) and the cycle highway problem (in which each customer is interested in an interval on the cycle of the items), and show approximation algorithms for the line highway problem and the cycle highway problem in which the smallest valuation is s and the largest valuation is (this is called an [s,]-valuation setting) or all valuations are identical (this is called a single valuation setting).

When a store sells items to customers, the store wishes to determine the prices of the items to maximize its profit. Intuitively, if the store sells the items with low (resp. high) prices, the customers buy more (resp. less) items, which provides less profit to the store. So it would be hard for the store to decide the prices of items. Assume that the store has a set V of n items and there is a set E of m customers who wish to buy those items, and also assume that each item i ∈ V has the production cost di and each customer ej ∈ E has the valuation vj on the bundle ej ⊆ V of items. When the store sells an item i ∈ V at the price ri, the profit for the item i is pi=ri-di. The goal of the store is to decide the price of each item to maximize its total profit. We refer to this maximization problem as the item pricing problem. In most of the previous works, the item pricing problem was considered under the assumption that pi ≥ 0 for each i ∈ V, however, Balcan, et al. [In Proc. of WINE, LNCS 4858, 2007] introduced the notion of "loss-leader," and showed that the seller can get more total profit in the case that pi < 0 is allowed than in the case that pi < 0 is not allowed. In this paper, we derive approximation preserving reductions among several item pricing problems and show that all of them have algorithms with good approximation ratio.