New paper: Pricing Randomized Allocations

A new paper titled “pricing randomized allocations” by Patrick Briest, Shuchi Chawla, Robert Kleinberg, and S. Matthew Weinberg was put on the arXiv.  The basic question that they study seems to be whether an auctioneer can increase his revenue by using randomized allocations rather than deterministic ones.  In the context of unit-demand auctions for heterogeneous goods the answer is “yes”, with some subtleties depending on the exact model.  This model is not 100% clear to me after briefly looking at the paper.

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