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Online Resource Allocation via Static Bundle Pricing
arXiv:2512.16570v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Online Resource Allocation addresses the problem of efficiently allocating limited resources to buyers with incomplete knowledge of future requests. In our setting, buyers arrive sequentially demanding a set of items, each with a value drawn from a known distribution. We study environments where buyers' valuations exhibit complementarities. In such settings, standard item-pricing mechanisms fail to leverage item multiplicities, while existing static bundle-pricing mechanisms rely on problem-specific arguments that do not generalize.
We develop a unified technique for online resource allocation with complementarities for three domains: (i) single-minded combinatorial auctions with maximum bundle size $d$, (ii) general single-minded combinatorial auctions, and (iii) a graph-based routing model in which buyers request to route a unit of flow from a source node $s$ to a target node $t$ in a capacitated graph. Our approach yields static and anonymous bundle-pricing mechanisms whose performance improves exponentially with item capacities. For the $d$-single-minded setting with minimum item capacity $B$, we obtain an $O(d^{1/B})$-competitive mechanism, recovering the known $O(d)$ bound for unit capacities ($B=1$) and achieving exponentially better guarantees as capacities grow. For general single-minded combinatorial auctions and the graph-routing model, we obtain $O(m^{1/(B+1)})$-competitive mechanisms, where $m$ is the number of items.
We complement these results with information-theoretic lower bounds. We show that no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than $\Omega((m/\ln m)^{1/(B+2)})$ in the general single-minded setting and $\Omega((d/\ln d)^{1/(B+1)})$ in the $d$-single-minded setting. In doing so, we reveal a deep connection to the extremal combinatorics problem of determining the maximum number of qualitatively independent partitions of a ground set.
Abstract: Online Resource Allocation addresses the problem of efficiently allocating limited resources to buyers with incomplete knowledge of future requests. In our setting, buyers arrive sequentially demanding a set of items, each with a value drawn from a known distribution. We study environments where buyers' valuations exhibit complementarities. In such settings, standard item-pricing mechanisms fail to leverage item multiplicities, while existing static bundle-pricing mechanisms rely on problem-specific arguments that do not generalize.
We develop a unified technique for online resource allocation with complementarities for three domains: (i) single-minded combinatorial auctions with maximum bundle size $d$, (ii) general single-minded combinatorial auctions, and (iii) a graph-based routing model in which buyers request to route a unit of flow from a source node $s$ to a target node $t$ in a capacitated graph. Our approach yields static and anonymous bundle-pricing mechanisms whose performance improves exponentially with item capacities. For the $d$-single-minded setting with minimum item capacity $B$, we obtain an $O(d^{1/B})$-competitive mechanism, recovering the known $O(d)$ bound for unit capacities ($B=1$) and achieving exponentially better guarantees as capacities grow. For general single-minded combinatorial auctions and the graph-routing model, we obtain $O(m^{1/(B+1)})$-competitive mechanisms, where $m$ is the number of items.
We complement these results with information-theoretic lower bounds. We show that no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio better than $\Omega((m/\ln m)^{1/(B+2)})$ in the general single-minded setting and $\Omega((d/\ln d)^{1/(B+1)})$ in the $d$-single-minded setting. In doing so, we reveal a deep connection to the extremal combinatorics problem of determining the maximum number of qualitatively independent partitions of a ground set.
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