Short Communication: Optimally Solving the Unit-Demand Envy-Free Pricing Problem with Metric Substitutability in Cubic Time

Abstract

In general, the unit-demand envy-free pricing problem has proven to be APX-hard, but some special cases can be optimally solved in polynomial time. When substitution costs that form a metric space are included, the problem can be solved in O(n4) time, and when the number of consumers is equal to the number of items—all with a single copy so that each consumer buys an item—a O(n3) time method is presented to solve it. This work shows that the first case has similarities with the second, and, by exploiting the structural properties of the costs set, it presents a O(n2) time algorithm for solving it when a competitive equilibrium is considered or a O(n3) time algorithm for more general scenarios. The methods are based on a dynamic programming strategy, which simplifies the calculations of the shortest paths in a network; this simplification is usually adopted in the second case. The theoretical results obtained provide efficiency in the search for optimal solutions to specific revenue management problems.