화학공학소재연구정보센터
Automatica, Vol.53, 369-375, 2015
Non-linear pricing by convex duality
We consider the pricing problem of a risk-neutral monopolist who produces (at a cost) and offers an infinitely divisible good to a single potential buyer that can be of a finite number of (single dimensional) types. The buyer has a non-linear utility function that is differentiable, strictly concave and strictly increasing. Using a simple reformulation and shortest path problem duality as in Vohra (2011) we transform the initial non-convex pricing problem of the monopolist into an equivalent optimization problem yielding a closed-form pricing formula under a regularity assumption on the probability distribution of buyer types. We examine the solution of the problem when the regularity condition is relaxed in different ways, or when the production function is non-linear and convex. For arbitrary type distributions, we offer a complete solution procedure. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights