Abstract

We present the first analysis of Fisher markets with buyers that have budget-additive utility functions. Budget-additive utilities are elementary concave functions with numerous applications in online adword markets and revenue optimization problems. They extend the standard case of linear utilities and have been studied in a variety of other market models. In contrast to the frequently studied CES utilities, they have a global satiation point which can imply multiple market equilibria with quite different characteristics. Our main result is an efficient combinatorial algorithm to compute a market equilibrium with a Pareto-optimal allocation of goods. It relies on a new descending-price approach and, as a special case, also implies a novel combinatorial algorithm for computing a market equilibrium in linear Fisher markets. We complement this positive result with a number of hardness results for related computational questions. We prove that it isNP-hard to compute a market equilibrium that maximizes social welfare, and it is PPAD-hard to find any market equilibrium with utility functions with separate satiation points for each buyer and each good.

@InProceedings{bei_et_al:LIPIcs:2016:6350,
  author =	{Xiaohui Bei and Jugal Garg and Martin Hoefer and Kurt Mehlhorn},
  title =	{{Computing Equilibria in Markets with Budget-Additive Utilities}},
  booktitle =	{24th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2016)},
  pages =	{8:1--8:14},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-015-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{57},
  editor =	{Piotr Sankowski and Christos Zaroliagis},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2016/6350},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-63504},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2016.8},
  annote =	{Keywords: Budget-Additive Utility, Market Equilibrium, Equilibrium Computation}
}