On profit-maximizing envy-free pricing
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Combination can be hard: approximability of the unique coverage problem
SODA '06 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithm
Single-minded unlimited supply pricing on sparse instances
SODA '06 Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithm
Approximation algorithms and online mechanisms for item pricing
EC '06 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
A quasi-PTAS for profit-maximizing pricing on line graphs
ESA'07 Proceedings of the 15th annual European conference on Algorithms
Bundle pricing with comparable items
ESA'07 Proceedings of the 15th annual European conference on Algorithms
Near-optimal pricing in near-linear time
WADS'05 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Algorithms and Data Structures
Optimal bundle pricing with monotonicity constraint
Operations Research Letters
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Since summer 2007, mobile phone users in the European Union (EU) are protected by a ceiling on the roaming tariff when calling or receiving a call abroad. We analyze the effects of this price regulative policy, and compare it to alternative implementations of price regulations. The problem is a three-level mathematical program: The EU determines the price regulative policy, the telephone operator sets profit-maximizing prices, and customers choose to accept or decline the operator's offer. The first part of this paper contains a polynomial time algorithm to solve such a three-level program. The crucial idea is to partition the polyhedron of feasible price regulative parameters into a polynomial number of smaller polyhedra such that a certain primitive decision problem can be written as an LP on each of those. Then the problem can be solved by a combination of enumeration and linear programming. In the second part, we analyze more specifically an instance of this problem, namely the price regulation problem that the EU encounters. Using customer-data from a large telephone operator, we compare different price regulative policies with respect to their social welfare. On the basis of the specific social welfare function, we observe that other price regulative policies or different ceilings can improve the total social welfare.